I live in the centre of Utrecht. I bought a place there a few years back. The apartment block has a parking garage underneath the house where I bought myself a place as well. Originally, the place cost €40.000 euro and there were 50 something places.

Because not all of the places were sold to the owners of the apartments, the government took the remaining places, to rent them out to other people. Obviously, the city of Utrecht do not want to loose money over the places. Taking into account an average interest rate of 5%, the interest alone would cost the government about €2.000,=. Add to that the service fee and a little bit of administrative overhead and you get to about €.2500,=. That’s kind of about right, because I can remember the government charged about €3.000,= a year per place.

Apparently nobody wanted to rent a place for that amount of money, so the places remained unoccupied for quite a while. Which in fact was good for us (the owners of the apartments), because now we could let visitors park at the empty places.

Just this morning, I received word from the head of the owners’ council, telling us that the government have rented out almost all places. This means, free parking for visitors is done and over with

What’s interesting though is the rate at which they rent out the places. Apparently, they’re charging about €1.500,=. This means they’re essentially loosing money on renting out the parking places, or in other words, they’re subsidizing the parking in the city centre. I’m not too bothered with that (although I do pay the €2.500 approximately for the interest, service fees, et cetera) because it’s just too convenient to have a parking place right underneath your house.

So it’s either the government doing subsidized parking, or maybe it’s the government taking their losses and speculating on a big increase of the prices of the parking spaces so that they make up for the losses when selling the parking spaces eventually…

Just for those that have to park at my place in the future, here’s a link to the parking map that you can use to figure out where to park if you do not want to pay the maximum rate of €3,85 per hour.