Merwede in Utrecht: how to design a neighbourhood without cars

Along the western bank of the Merwedekanaal in Utrecht, a new district called Merwede is rising: roughly six thousand homes, good for around twelve thousand residents, on what used to be industrial land. The municipality itself calls it the largest car-free inner-city neighbourhood in the Netherlands. And that's not just a slogan, it shows up in the numbers.

The first construction phase of 4,200 homes is underway; completion of the full district is expected around 2030. What sets Merwede apart from an average new-build project isn't the architecture, but the parking balance underneath it.

A parking standard of 0.3 (and maybe lower still)

Where a typical new-build neighbourhood outside the city centre would plan for at least one parking space per home, Utrecht applies a standard of 0.3 spaces per home for Merwede, and according to the municipality, that could drop further still to 0.2 if the district's mobility concept demonstrably works. For a district of six thousand homes, that's a fraction of the cars a traditional neighbourhood of the same size would house.

Cars belonging to residents and visitors are routed straight from the Europalaan to underground garages at the edge of the district, together holding around 1,800 spaces. The rest of the neighbourhood is effectively closed to cars, aside from a temporary exemption (for a house move, say). Anyone living in Merwede parks at the edge by definition and walks the last stretch, not to their own front door.

Mobility as a company, not an afterthought

A district with this few private parking spaces only works if the alternative is genuinely well organised, and developers and the municipality haven't left that to chance. Since January 2023, a dedicated mobility company has arranged and guaranteed transport within and to Merwede: from shared cars to cycling facilities. Further out, at P+R Westraven and the new Mobility Hub XL in Papendorp, additional parking and transfer capacity has been built in.

That's also exactly where the policy draws criticism: not everyone can simply do without a car, for instance because of a disability, and a district designed this tightly around that assumption has to keep accounting for it in practice. The municipality acknowledges as much itself in its broader mobility vision for the city: a low parking standard solves one problem and immediately shifts attention to another.

For the people who'll live there, it mostly means this: the few hundred spaces that do exist have to work far harder than in an ordinary neighbourhood. Eighteen hundred spaces for six thousand homes isn't a margin, it's a tight supply that only holds up if it's shared rather than permanently assigned. In a district with numbers like these, a parking space that only one household is allowed to use is, in effect, a waste of something already scarce: exactly the problem shared use is meant to solve.