The Ministry is finalizing building regulations; bike storage rooms for apartments will not be mandatory

The new ordinance is being developed in connection with the new building law, aiming to define requirements for constructions. These will become mandatory for the entire country from July 1, 2024, excluding Prague, Brno, and Ostrava. These three major cities will have the option to approve their own regulations.

The ordinance expands on the basic construction requirements set by law, providing clear, modern, technically realistic, and economically viable guidelines for protecting public interests in construction, according to the MMR. It includes requirements for land demarcation, and the placement and technical parameters of buildings. Additionally, the new ordinance unifies the currently fragmented legal regulations by integrating construction requirements defined by other laws. This includes technical requirements for waterworks, pools, swimming pools, and saunas.

Organizations such as AutoMat (MNK is an independent project of the association, note by the editor), Arnika, and Pěšky městem, through the joint platform Green Circle, submitted several comments on the proposal. These mainly concerned the reduction of mandatory car parking spaces, bicycle parking, and improvements to green infrastructure in public spaces. However, most of Green Circle’s suggestions were not incorporated into the final version of the ordinance, as they were rejected by the MMR officials.

„Any form of transportation is determined by each individual’s decision early in the morning on how they will travel that day. This decision is logically made based on the available conditions. This is precisely why it is essential to address mandatory bicycle storage with appropriate capacities within buildings, rather than just recommending parts of the structure that are often canceled during the construction preparation process,“ explains Květoslav Syrový, a traffic engineer and co-presenter of the Green Circle’s proposals to amend the ordinance.

Bicycle storage within buildings should have the same accessibility and convenience as car parking, taking into account the possibility of regular commuting to school, work, or for recreational purposes. „We proposed a realistic calculation for bicycle parking and prepared wording applicable to the ordinance. However, bicycle parking was included only for schools, and even then with unclear wording,“ added Michal Kalina from the AutoMat association.

Requirements for bike parking at residential buildings, offices, and shops were not incorporated into the ordinance at all. „Why should cars, which take up 10 times more space than bicycles, continue to be favored in this way? For many countries similar to us, such as Bulgaria, Slovenia, Hungary, and Lithuania, incorporating such an adjustment was not a problem already a long time ago,“ added Kalina.

„It’s certainly great that the MMR was convinced not to mandate two parking spaces for an average-sized apartment. However, in terms of sustainable mobility, it could have gone much further […] It could have also given municipalities the option to relax parking requirements for cars in cases where there is good public transportation accessibility or for specific housing projects, such as cooperative or association projects with shared cars or bikes,“ said Anna Vinklárková from the Arnika organization.

The ordinance from the Ministry for Regional Development will take effect on July 1, 2024. Meanwhile, a transitional period until July 1, 2027, will allow the use of documentation according to the current regulations.

Will the European Union demand its inclusion?

The Czech Republic may still have to incorporate the requirement for bicycle parking into legislation. The European Parliament will soon be discussing a new directive from the European Commission on the energy performance of buildings (EPBD). This directive explicitly includes bicycle parking in residential and non-residential buildings. It also calls for support for housing with sustainable mobility and sustainable spatial planning.