“People in Prague Have Nowhere to Park,” Said Local Representative

With the statement “Prague must belong to the people of Prague”, Prague representative Ondřej Prokop (ANO) drew attention to the increasingly challenging traffic situation in the metropolis.

According to him, the people of Prague have nowhere to park. Drivers coming from Central Bohemia who commute to work are to blame.

The Prague representative sees the problem primarily in housing estates near metro stations, where vehicles from outside of Prague are
mostly parked during the day. For example, in the street near the Stodůlky metro station, on Monday morning, more than half of the cars had registration plates from outside the city.

Many people living in the capital are also troubled by the problem. “A lot of people who go to Prague to work park here, they leave their cars in the housing estate and then you come home and you have no place to park your car,” said one citizen from Prague. “Mostly from six to eight, when people come home from work, it’s really full and you’re driving around looking for a place to put it,” added another.

About 200,000 people from the Central Bohemian Region commute to the capital every day for work, and every year their number increases by
around 15,000 following rising rents in the capital and the pandemic making the suburban lifestyle more appealing.

But according to economists, Prague is not self-sufficient and needs labor from the largest region in the Czech Republic.

“They often work in highly qualified positions and it is not easy to find a replacement for these workers within two or three years. Prague is a kind of mushroom that sucks out the workforce from its immediate surroundings,” said economist Lukáš Kovanda.

On Monday, Prague representative Ondřej Prokop and Central Bohemian Region Governor Petra Pecková (STAN) talked about this issue on TN Live. “At seven in the morning, the parking lot is full of our residents, some of them leave, and the parking lot quickly fills up with cars coming from the highway,” said Prokop.

“Where do those residents go when they work in Prague? Don’t they use public transport?” objected the governor. “These are, for example, seniors who go to the doctor, then come back and cannot park,” added the Prague representative.

“This phenomenon is not only related to the fact that Central Bohemians would park there, but is simply related to the fact that the number of cars per person is growing enormously,” said Pecková.

The Governor of the Central Bohemian Region also objects that on the weekends, on the contrary, people from Prague go to the cottages and fill the villages of Central Bohemia.

“Normally every weekend, up to 1,500 Praguers come to our cottages in Mnichov and buy sausages from the butcher shop on the bridge and also
from the butcher shop on the square. We won’t have any left. Central Bohemian sausages for the Central Bohemians!” wrote Pecková on Twitter.