American norms require more space for car than for bedroom. How about Amsterdam?
8 August 2013
«Odds are, your bedroom is smaller than your car’s: your city nearly requires it to be», this infographic explains (via Herbert Tiemens). Perhaps so in the US or Canada - but how about Amsterdam?
- According to national regulations (see p.152), a residence area - which may coincide with or comprise a bedroom - must be at least 5 m2. This is not to say bedrooms are usually that size; it’s a minimum. For example, many bedrooms in the new Oostpoort project in Amsterdam Oost are 9.5 m2, 11 m2 or larger (these examples regard houses that are not in the ‘affordable’ category).
- For new houses, the Amsterdam West district requires 0.6 parking spaces per house if it’s affordable housing and 0.8 per house in other cases (where, as the Zuid district puts it, «it may be expected that [households] have a median or high income and own a car»). Parking norms in some other districts are higher, e.g. 0.6/1.1 for the aforementioned Oostpoort project; 0.7/1.0 in Zuid and 1.0/1.3 in Nieuw-West.
- For guidelines regarding the size of parking spaces, the Amsterdam municipality refers to expertise platform CROW. CROW advises 2.5 x 5 metres or 2.0 x 6 to 7 metres depending on the type of parking space; that amounts to a surface area of between 12 and 14 m2.
This implies that the required space for car parking may vary from 7.2 to 18.2 m2 per new house. Or 1.4 to 3.6 times the minimum size of a bedroom. Of course, most bedrooms will be larger than the minimum 5 m2. That said, your bedroom may very well be smaller than the required car space.