On 13 May 2026, Stellos had the privilege of presenting at the ParkingSwiss Association General Assembly in Bern, in front of around 120 people from across the Swiss parking industry. It was an opportunity to share our perspective on a question that has been at the core of our work: why, after a century of debate, are cities, owners, operators, and mobility experts still struggling with the same parking problem?
Here is what we presented.
Parking is not only a building problem
The starting point of our presentation was a reframe. Parking has typically been managed as a building problem: one property, one operator, one access rule, one contract, one isolated car park. Each asset managed in isolation, with no view of how it fits into the broader urban system around it.
Our argument is that this framing is wrong, and that it explains why the problem persists. Parking is a system problem. Every private space, every public space, every access rule, every pricing decision, and every data gap influences how people move through a city. Manage it in fragments and the result is not less traffic. It is displaced traffic.
The invisible 89 percent
One figure we put in front of the room: only around 11 percent of urban parking spaces are public, visible, and actively controllable. The remaining 89 percent are private, fragmented, and largely invisible to the people looking for them.
Cities cannot solve the parking problem if most of the available capacity sits outside any coordinated system. The opportunity is not to build more parking. The opportunity is to make existing capacity visible, usable, and connected.
Technology alone is not the answer
We were also direct about the limits of what technology can do on its own. Better software, access control, payments, occupancy data, and pricing tools can help significantly. But the parking problem touches municipalities, real estate owners, operators, tenants, visitors, drivers, and technology partners at the same time. No single platform solves that by itself.
What a system approach requires is shared visibility, aligned incentives, and practical tools that make it easier for private capacity to be managed and used. The discussion in Bern reinforced this. The industry has the knowledge and the infrastructure. The next step is connecting the pieces.
Thank you to ParkingSwiss
Presenting at the General Assembly of the Swiss Parking Association was a real honour. We are grateful to the ParkingSwiss team for the invitation and for creating the space for this kind of open, cross-sector conversation.
Thank you to all the members in the room for the constructive discussion that followed. The next 100 years of parking do not have to look like the last 100.