The ADAC had several items on their checklist when they tested car parks across Europe in 2016. They checked to see if the parking spaces were wide enough, whether the parking lot was well lit and whether different types of cars could get in to a given underground parking lot without too much trouble. Three years on, RTL went back to see what changes were made.
The ADAC automobile club tested three underground parking lots in Luxembourg in 2016: St. Esprit, Place Guillaume II (Knuedler) and the one on Avenue Monterey. They received rather underwhelming test scores three years ago as testers found that the parking spots were too tight, the entrance was too dimly lit and that pedestrians weren’t sufficiently protected from traffic inside the parking lot.
When RTL went back for tests this year, the results were sobering. In St. Esprit, parking spots were impossibly tight. The ADAC guidelines recommend parking spots to be at least 2.5 metres wide. In the past couple of years, cars became about 20 centimetres wider on average. Take the Golf 1 for example: The 1974 model only measured 1.61 metres across, while the latest edition comes in at 1.81 metres.
In each of the three tested parking lots, the width of parking spaces was an issue. The widest parking space RTL found in any of the three parking lots measured 2.35 metres, still well below the ADAC guideline of 2.5 metres.
Do’s and Dont’s: Parking your car
A parking expert’s view on #badparking, pt1
A parking expert’s view on #badparking, pt2
