How many park and ride lots does Berlin have, and do they cost anything?

49 lots at 38 stations, holding 4,523 cars, and every one of them is free. That is the city's own register, surveyed to the end of 2025. There are also 3,247 bike spaces at the same sites. None of the lots is run as a paid car park and none of them takes a reservation.

Which ticket do I need after parking at a Berlin park and ride lot?

A Berlin AB ticket, always. Forty-four of the 49 lots are in fare zone B and five are in zone A, so nothing inside the city needs an ABC ticket. A single AB ticket is 4.00 euro, a 24 hour AB ticket is 11.20 euro, and a 24 hour small group ticket covering up to five people is 35.30 euro. Children aged 6 to 14 pay 2.50 euro for a single.

Do I need a green Umweltplakette to use park and ride in Berlin?

Not for the lots themselves, but you need one to reach the centre by car. Berlin's low-emission zone covers the whole area inside the inner S-Bahn Ring, and driving or parking there without a green sticker costs 80 euro. All 49 park and ride lots sit outside that boundary. Visitors arriving from abroad need the sticker too, and it has to be ordered from the vehicle registration authority with your vehicle papers, so it is not something you can buy on arrival.

How long does the ride from a park and ride lot into central Berlin take?

Usually between 15 and 30 minutes. Checked against live timetables for a weekday morning into Alexanderplatz: Berlin-Lichtenberg is 12 minutes on the U5, Plänterwald 14 on the S9, Pankow-Heinersdorf 17, Springpfuhl 18 direct on the S7, Biesdorf 19 on the S5, Wuhletal 21, Ahrensfelde 28 direct on the S7 and Hönow 33 on the U5. The far southern and western lots at Breitenbachplatz, Wannsee and Stresow are around 30 to 33 minutes.

Park and Ride in Berlin: Which Lots Still Have Room and Which Are Already Full

Q: Which park and ride lot in Berlin is most likely to have space?

Pankow-Heinersdorf P1. It is the largest single lot in the network at 407 spaces and it was recorded under 75 per cent full, which only 7 of the 49 lots manage. From the station it is 17 minutes to Alexanderplatz on the S26 with one change to the U2. The other under-75-per-cent lots are Ahrensfelde P3, Bundesplatz P1, Hohenschönhausen P1, Raoul-Wallenberg-Straße P1, Plänterwald P1 and Wuhlheide P1.

Q: Is it better to park in Brandenburg before entering Berlin?

Often yes, if you can accept the ABC ticket. The surrounding Brandenburg belt has 59 park and ride sites with about 10,730 spaces, more than twice Berlin's own total. The multi-storey car parks at Potsdam Hauptbahnhof (1,392 spaces) and Hennigsdorf (719) are the biggest, followed by Bernau-Friedenstal (590), Oranienburg (509) and Erkner (381). Because those sit outside the city boundary the ride in needs an ABC ticket: 5.00 euro single, 12.90 euro for 24 hours.

Yusuf Ucuz

5 days ago

8 min read

Driving into Berlin looks easy on a map. One motorway ring, a few radial roads, and a city centre that is only twenty kilometres from the edge. Then you get close, the Umweltzone signs start, the parking garages near Alexanderplatz want real money by the hour, and you realise the last ten kilometres are the expensive ones.

Park and ride is the way out of that, and Berlin does have a proper network of it. The city keeps a public register of every lot, and I pulled the current version while writing this. There are 49 park and ride lots inside Berlin, at 38 stations, holding 4,523 cars, and every single one of them is free to use. There are another 3,247 bike spaces sitting alongside them.

That sounds generous until you look at the second column in the same dataset.

More than half the lots are already full

The city does not just record where the lots are. It records how full the districts found them, in three bands. Of the 49 lots in Berlin:

27 lots are over 90 per cent full. That is 2,061 spaces you should treat as taken.
15 lots sit between 75 and 90 per cent.
Only 7 lots are under 75 per cent full, and between them they hold 796 spaces.

So the real number is not 4,523. On a normal weekday morning the useful capacity is closer to eight hundred spaces spread across seven car parks, and none of them takes a booking. Berlin's park and ride network was built for commuters who arrive before eight, and by the time a visitor rolls in at ten the good lots have been full for two hours.

I have watched people learn this the slow way at Alt-Mariendorf, circling a lot marked over 90 per cent full while the U6 they wanted left twice. The fix is not to drive faster. It is to pick a lot that still had room when the city counted, and to set off with a second one already in mind.

S-Bahn and U-Bahn trains meeting at Wuhletal station in east Berlin

Wuhletal, where the S5 and the U5 meet on the same platform. Its 144 spaces are 21 minutes from Alexanderplatz.

Park and ride in Berlin: the lots I would actually aim for

Ride times below are real ones. I checked each station against live timetables for a weekday morning arrival at Alexanderplatz, which is where my walking tour starts and where most first days in Berlin begin.

Pankow-Heinersdorf P1 is the one I would drive to first. It is the largest single park and ride lot in Berlin at 407 spaces, it was under 75 per cent full when the city surveyed it, and it is 17 minutes to Alexanderplatz on the S26 with one change to the U2. Nothing else in the network combines that much space with that little risk.

The rest of the shortlist, in the order I would try them:

Ahrensfelde P3, 198 spaces, under 75 per cent, right at the eastern city boundary. 27 minutes in, or 28 minutes with no change at all on the S7.
Springpfuhl P1, 410 spaces and the biggest lot in the east, but in the 75 to 90 per cent band. 18 minutes on the S7 with no change, which is the best direct ride on this list.
Bundesplatz P1, 83 spaces, under 75 per cent, the only genuinely comfortable option on the west side. 24 minutes via the U9.
Hohenschönhausen P1, 47 spaces, under 75 per cent, 26 minutes.
Raoul-Wallenberg-Straße P1, 45 spaces, under 75 per cent, 24 minutes on the S7 with no change.

Two lots have a local rule that is easy to miss and will cost you the morning. Parchimer Allee P1 cannot be used on Fridays between 08:00 and 20:00, because the weekly market takes the surface. Friedrichshagen P1 is closed to parking on Sundays for the flea market. Both are printed in the city's own register and on no sign you will see from the motorway.

One curiosity worth knowing: the fastest ride in the whole network is from Berlin-Lichtenberg, 12 minutes to Alexanderplatz on the U5 with no change. Its lot has 38 spaces and sits in the 75 to 90 per cent band, so it is a lovely idea that rarely works.

The S-Bahn station at Springpfuhl in Marzahn with two trains and a freight line

Springpfuhl in Marzahn. Its 410-space lot is the biggest in east Berlin and the S7 runs from here to Alexanderplatz in 18 minutes without a change.

The ticket is simpler than the parking

This part is genuinely good news. Every park and ride lot inside Berlin sits in fare zone A or B, so a normal Berlin AB ticket covers the ride in from all 49 of them. Forty-four are in zone B, five are in zone A, and none is in zone C. You never need to think about the zone question if you park inside the city.

Current BVG prices:

Single ticket AB: 4.00 euro (2.50 euro for children aged 6 to 14)
24-hour ticket AB: 11.20 euro (7.40 euro reduced)
24-hour small group ticket AB, up to five people: 35.30 euro

The crossover matters if you are a carful of people. Two adults doing a return trip pay 16 euro in single tickets. Two adults on 24-hour tickets pay 22.40 euro and can move around the city all day. Four adults are past 44 euro on day tickets, which is when the small group ticket starts to look sensible. Buy on the platform machine or in the BVG app before you board; there is more on how the zones work in my guide to Berlin's AB and ABC ticket zones.

The green sticker rule that catches foreign cars

Here is the part that surprises visitors most. Berlin has a low-emission zone, the Umweltzone, and it covers the whole city centre inside the inner S-Bahn Ring. Since 1 January 2010 only vehicles carrying a green Umweltplakette may go in. The Senate's own wording is blunt: driving or parking inside the zone without a green sticker or an exemption is an offence and costs 80 euro.

Two things follow from that.

First, foreign-registered cars need the sticker too. Berlin says so directly: visitors from abroad who come to the city by car need an Umweltplakette for their vehicle. It is not something you can buy at a kiosk on arrival either, because the registration authority has to see your vehicle papers first. If you are driving to Berlin from another country and you have not sorted this at home, assume you cannot legally reach the middle.

Second, and this is the useful half: all 49 park and ride lots lie outside the mapped low-emission zone. I checked every lot against the official zone boundary. The park and ride network was designed to catch you before the sticker rule applies, which is exactly what you want.

The five lots in fare zone A, at Bundesplatz, Heidelberger Platz, Jungfernheide and Tempelhof, all sit on the Ringbahn itself, and the Ringbahn is itself the boundary. Heidelberger Platz is eleven metres outside the line. My advice: if your car has no green sticker, treat those five as unavailable and use a zone B lot with real distance between you and the edge. Do not build a legal decision on eleven metres. If you want the detail, I wrote separately about the Umweltzone sticker and how to get one.

A green German Umweltplakette sticker on a car windscreen

The green Umweltplakette. Without one on the windscreen you may not drive or park inside the S-Bahn Ring, and that applies to foreign cars as well.

Coming from further out? Stop before the city boundary

If you are driving in from Hamburg, Dresden, Poland or anywhere that puts you on the A10 ring, the smarter move is usually to stop before Berlin starts. The same register covers the Brandenburg belt, and the numbers there are on a different scale: 59 lots with about 10,730 spaces, more than twice everything inside the city.

The big ones are the multi-storey car parks at Potsdam Hauptbahnhof (1,392 spaces) and Hennigsdorf (719), then Bernau-Friedenstal (590), Oranienburg (509), Erkner (381), Königs Wusterhausen (379), Falkensee (362) and Nauen (314).

The S-Bahn terminus at Ahrensfelde on Berlin's eastern city boundary

Ahrensfelde, right on the eastern city boundary. Its three lots hold 371 cars between them and the S7 runs into Alexanderplatz in 28 minutes without a change.

The trade-off is the ticket. Those lots are outside the city boundary, so you need an ABC ticket: 5.00 euro single, 12.90 euro for 24 hours, 37.70 euro for a small group of five. That is one euro more per single journey than parking inside Berlin. For two people that is two euro to swap a probably-full 45-space lot for a car park with hundreds of spaces, which is a trade I would take most mornings.

The board, sorted by which side you are driving from

The tool below plots all 49 Berlin lots at their real positions, sized by how many cars they hold and coloured by how full the city found them. The dashed shape in the middle is the actual low-emission zone boundary. Pick the side you are approaching from and it ranks what is there, with the verified ride time to Alexanderplatz for each one.

The regional and S-Bahn platform hall at Berlin Alexanderplatz

The platform hall at Alexanderplatz, where most park and ride journeys into the centre end.

What this means for a day in the centre

Once the car is parked, Berlin's historic core is small. From Alexanderplatz you are standing at the World Clock, and the World Clock to Hackescher Markt by way of the TV Tower, the Rotes Rathaus, Marienkirche, the Marx-Engels-Forum, the Humboldt Forum, the Lustgarten and Museum Island is about three kilometres of flat walking. That is the whole shape of a first day, and it needs no car at all.

That walk is also the route of the free walking tour I run: 11 stops covering 16 places, around 2 hours, starting at the World Clock. If you have driven in and parked at Pankow-Heinersdorf or Springpfuhl, you are 17 or 18 minutes from the meeting point.

My advice for the whole thing, in one line: park where the city says there is still room, ride in on an AB ticket, and leave the car where it is until you go home. Berlin punishes people who keep moving a car around the middle, and it rewards people who walk. If you are still deciding whether to bring a car at all, I have written about that too.

The station building at Pankow-Heinersdorf in north Berlin

Pankow-Heinersdorf. The lot beside this station holds 407 cars, the most of any single park and ride site in Berlin.

One last practical note

Park and ride lots in Berlin are surface car parks in ordinary residential districts, not guarded garages. They have no barrier, no attendant and no reservation system. Take your valuables with you, note the lot number so you can find the car again in the dark, and check the last train home before you set off: most S-Bahn lines thin out heavily after midnight on weeknights, though the network runs through the night at weekends.

If parking in the centre is what you actually need, for a hotel drop-off or a short errand, the garages around Alexanderplatz are a separate calculation and I have priced those out here.

Image credits

Source and licence details for the 5 photographs used in this article.

S-Bahn and U-Bahn trains meeting at Wuhletal station in east Berlin: Standardizer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The S-Bahn station at Springpfuhl in Marzahn: Froth82, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The S-Bahn terminus at Ahrensfelde on the eastern city boundary: Michael.F.H.Barth, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The regional and S-Bahn platform hall at Berlin Alexanderplatz: Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The S-Bahn stop at Pankow-Heinersdorf in north Berlin: A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.