New apartment complex ditches car parks for bike-friendly design + video

Scandavians have once again been caught red-handed pushing the parapet for sustainable transport and sustainable living forward; this time it's Sweden and a cycle-friendly car park-less apartment complex in Malmö.

Car parking is an issue for inner-city building. You either make-do with insufficient street-level car parking, or you dig deep into the ground and build a car park to accommodate the vehicles of the numerous residents of big apartment complexes.

The decision was made to forgo car parking completely in one of Malmö's most recent building projects, the Cykelehuset Ohboy!

The seven-storey hotel/apartment project is Sweden's first apartment building with absolutely no car parking included, instead it has copious amounts of bike parking places - and even allows you to easily take your bikes, even if you own a cargo bike, up to your apartment with you.

The stairways, doorways, lifts, and hallways of the buildings apartments and foyers are specifically designed to be spacious enough to accommodate bikes as large as cargo bikes; you can even wheel your bike right into your kitchen to unload your groceries.

The complex isn't even restricted to apartments. The bottom levels of the building belong to a bike hotel which has 31 ground-level loft apartments available to rent. Each one is specifically equipped to accommodate people accessing the city by bike.

Occupancy is set to get underway towards the end of 2016. For more information head over to the Ohboy! website, here.

Of course, this isn't the first building in the world to accommodate cyclists. The Norman Foster Building in London was specifically designed with space for each resident to park a bicycle.

Equally, designers have looked at the problem of accommodating cyclists in small inner-city apartments from the other perspective. Dutch Design Academy Eindhoven graduate David Roman Lieshout flipped the problem on its head when he designed the Corridor bike prototype that can easily fit down the tightest of hallways and in the smallest of flats.