Europe's Most Visitor-Friendly Car Park Receives SKIDATA Parking System

The car park with its 620 underground parking spaces on four levels is open for business. It's situated only a sone's throw from the fashionable Bahnhofstrasse shopping street.
"Zurich has got a new attraction now," observed Thomas A. Rüegg, President of the car park's operator City Parkhaus AG, in his opening address at yesterday's opening ceremony. The high-profile event was attended by 400 guests from all walks of political, economic and cultural life. The project, which carries a price tag of 47 million Swiss Francs (around € 31m), took two years from planning to completion. The Gessnerallee car park is the first large-sized parking garage in over thirty years to open in the city of Zurich.

According to the operators, it is "Europe's most visitor friendly car park" – a light, open construction that offers an integrated parking guidance system, cellphone reception at all levels, a convenient drive-in gallery, and a 24-hour attended control room.

As a special customer service, the car park ticket entitles its holder to free use of the city's public transport system.

As one of the foremost parking management specialists in the country, SKIDATA Switzerland was commissioned for the Gessnerallee project already at a very early stage. This was to allow SKIDATA to make sure that the parking system would satisfy the operators' stringent demands with respect to parking management. Apart from the state-of-the-art parking system itself, SKIDATA Switzerland also supplied the CCTV and public anouncement systems, single-space monitoring components, and an intercom system.