Bietigheim-Bissingen raises parking tariff tenfold after 43 years

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Die Einfahrt zum Parkhaus mit der starken PreiserhöhungFoto: Hagen Stegmüller Foto: Hagen Stegmüller

Der Billig-Tarif von 10 Cent gilt aktuell noch. Ab Januar ist damit Schluss Foto: Hagen Stegmüller Foto: Hagen Stegmüller

So sieht das Parkhaus innen ausFoto: Hagen Stegmüller Foto: Hagen Stegmüller

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A parking garage in Bietigheim-Bissingen is raising its hourly tariff tenfold in January 2027 — from ten cents to one euro, the first increase since 1983. Drivers at the garage on Löchgauer Straße paid 20 Pfennig an hour in the D-Mark era, which became ten cents with the euro. The garage was known as Germany's cheapest.

The Baden-Württemberg town of 43,354 inhabitants expects to lose around 20 million euros this year and hopes the increase across all five municipal garages will bring in roughly one million more. "We want to involve drivers in the costs of the parking facilities," First Mayor Michael Hanus told Bild — an admission that until now, they have not been.

They were not meant to be. The municipal council held the tariff down deliberately, town hall spokesperson Anette Hochmuth explained, to strengthen the town's own shopping location against Breuningerland Ludwigsburg, the rival mall down the road. Cheap parking beside the pedestrian zone, the doctors' practices and the town hall was a retail subsidy, paid out of the town's budget year after year since the early eighties.

The correction now arrives as a 900 percent increase, the kind of figure that makes headlines. The absolute level is less dramatic: one euro an hour remains well under Stuttgart's cheapest lot at 2.50, and the Gerber Center there charges 4.50. Four decades of inflation, absorbed in a single step, land at the bottom of the market anyway.

Until January, the old tariff still applies: ten cents an hour at Löchgauer Straße, half that after six in the evening.