African Turntables and Parking Solutions

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African Turntables and Parking Solutions Reclaim space, improve safety, maximise ROI.

ATTPS provides custom turntables and automated parking systems that double or even quadruple capacity in the same footprint - helping Africa’s architects, developers, and planners design smarter.

South Africa’s parking problem finally has options.Parking comes up in every project meeting in Cape Town. It is usually...
12/10/2026

South Africa’s parking problem finally has options.

Parking comes up in every project meeting in Cape Town. It is usually a complaint, not a conversation.

Too many bays. Not enough land. A ratio that doesn’t work on the site you’ve got. Everyone agrees it is a problem, and then everyone moves on to the next agenda item.

On Thursday 29 October there is something to say.

Michael Rohwer, Managing Director of ATTPS, presents “Reimagining Parking in Dense Urban Environments” at the Cape Institute for Architecture in Cape Town. Mechanical, semi-automatic and fully automatic systems, what each one asks of a building, what each one gives back in usable land, and worked examples from projects around the world.

For architects, town planners, urban designers, developers and engineers in Cape Town.

Cape Institute for Architecture, 116 Loop Street, Cape Town C*D
Thursday 29 October 2026
Doors 5pm, talk 5:30pm, ends 7pm
W**e, b**r, soft drinks and canapés

The Cape Institute for Architecture has assessed and validated this Category One CPD Activity. The activity carries 0.15 Category 1 CPD Points.

Free to attend. 40 seats. RSVP link is in the comments.

This one means a lot to us.Our presentation, "Reimagining Parking in Dense Urban Environments", is now CPD validated. Th...
29/09/2026

This one means a lot to us.

Our presentation, "Reimagining Parking in Dense Urban Environments", is now CPD validated. The Cape Institute for Architecture has assessed and validated this Category One CPD Activity. The activity carries 0.15 Category 1 CPD Points.

For a team that has spent years bringing German-engineered automated parking to South Africa, it's a proud moment and a real vote of confidence from the profession. Our sincere thanks to the Cape Institute for Architecture and its CPD Committee for their time, their guidance and for awarding this validation.

Every project comes back to the same question: where do the cars go?

In the city, parking takes the land meant for homes and public space. At home, it takes the garden, the pool or the view.

Less land for parking. More room for everything else.

Join us for our first CPD evening, presented by our Managing Director, Michael Rohwer. Drawing on built projects from around the world, the session shows what becomes possible when parking stops dictating the design.

Thursday 29 October 2026
Doors open 5pm, talk 5:30pm to 7pm
Cape Institute for Architecture, 116 Loop Street, Cape Town C*D
Drinks and canapés served

Only 40 seats.
The link to join us on 29 October is in the first comment.

We chatted recently with the owner of a Cessna 172 Skyhawk, hangared at Atlantic Aerodrome, Cape Town's premier general ...
25/09/2026

We chatted recently with the owner of a Cessna 172 Skyhawk, hangared at Atlantic Aerodrome, Cape Town's premier general aviation gateway. His aircraft is 11 m from wingtip to wingtip, and his hangar is 30 m wide and 15 m deep.

Here's the thing about a hangar. The aircraft goes in on a tow bar and comes out on a tow bar. Every move is a chance to meet a wall, a trolley or another wingtip, and the risk of ground damage is highest exactly when an aircraft is being towed.

So here is what we would put in his floor.

A turntable. It's a 4.5 m platform set into the concrete and finished to match, so it disappears into the floor. Roll the aircraft on, press and hold a button on the key fob, and it turns. A half turn takes thirty seconds, it runs quietly (under 50 dBA), and it only moves while you hold the button. Let go and it stops. Then the Skyhawk rolls out nose first, facing the door.

In a tight hangar, there are also sensors. Mounted overhead, they shine down and mark the edge of the turning circle. If the aircraft is parked a little off centre and any part of it breaks that light, the motor stops before a wingtip or the tail reaches the wall or the aircraft beside it.

The pit is formed as the hangar floor is poured, so nothing gets dug up afterwards. We install and commission the platform, and we come back once a year for a straightforward service. It carries ten years on the structure and two on the moving parts. It comes in six standard sizes, from 4.0 m to 6.5 m, and larger ones can be built to order.

If you own a hangar, or you're planning one, we'd love to talk it through.

ATTPS is the African partner for Australian Turntables, an ISO-certified manufacturer, and we are leading the turntable space with installations countrywide.

Questions about weight, floor, drainage and power? The answers are in the comments below.

09/09/2026

Imagine a new retirement estate going up in the hills above Paarl, and every home comes with a parking system that holds two cars in the space of one. If you have a car you drive most days and a second one that only comes out now and then, the WÖHR Parklift 411 is exactly what you need. Both cars stay. The space stays the same.

This is how it works. Your second car, the one you use less often, drives onto a steel platform. One press of a button and hydraulics raise it to full height, where steel locks take over and hold it there. Your everyday car then parks underneath, at ground level, exactly the way it always has. Two cars, one bay, and nothing has been dug or excavated to make it happen.

The parking sits in its own building next to the clubhouse and the care centre, and it has to hold 120 vehicles for sixty homes, as an example. The useful thing is that those vehicles behave completely differently. A handful go out daily. Plenty of them stand for months. Put the ones that rarely move up on the platforms, park the everyday cars beneath them, and let the estate team run the lifts as part of the service they already provide. No second level. No basement. No extra ground.

The garage itself is nothing unusual. It stands a little taller inside than a normal one, and the ATTPS team bolts the units straight down to the concrete floor slab. Nothing gets dug, so the parking goes up with the rest of the estate rather than months ahead of it.

What it means for the people living there is the part that matters most. The classic in the garage stays. The car that goes to the grandchildren stays. Both cars stay.

WÖHR have been engineering these systems in Germany since 1959. ATTPS supplies and installs them across South Africa, from the W**elands to Johannesburg and Durban, and hands over a system that works.

Wondering about safety, vehicle sizes, or how it works day to day? We've put those answers in the comments below for you.

If you are planning a retirement or lifestyle estate, or you are looking at one and wondering about the parking, we are happy to talk it through.

01/09/2026

No ramps. No aisles. No driving down.

Think about the last time you parked underground. You drove down a long slope, round a corner, down another one, then along a wide lane looking for a space.

All of that slope and all of that lane had to be dug out, waterproofed, lit and ventilated. None of it holds a car. On a normal basement, a parking bay is about 12 m², but by the time you add the lane to reverse out of, the turning area and the ramp from the street, each space has cost you closer to 40 m². Two thirds of the hole in the ground is there so a car can reach a space.

And it gets worse the deeper you go, because every level needs its own ramp.

The WÖHR CombiParker 560 gets rid of all of it. Cars sit on platforms stacked in a grid below the entrance. The platforms slide sideways into an empty slot and lift or lower, the way a tile puzzle moves when one square is left free. You drive onto a platform at street level, park, and walk away. When you want the car, you tap a chip or use your phone, and the platform brings it back to the same doorway.

Nothing is ever driven between levels, so there is no ramp to build.

There is something else worth knowing. While your car is parked, nobody can get near it. It sits on its own platform behind a locked automatic door, and there is no lane for anyone to walk down.

On WÖHR's own comparison, the same cars fit into roughly 9 m² per space instead of 40. Around 75% less area, 45% less material and 42% less CO2 in construction.

It is not magic. It still needs a pit, automatic doors, drainage and a service contract. But you dig once, for the cars, and not for everything built to reach them.

WÖHR has been building these in Germany since 1959. ATTPS supplies and installs them across Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Pretoria.

One doorway. Sixty four cars. No basement.Your stand is steep, your forty eight apartments need about seventy two bays, ...
18/08/2026

One doorway. Sixty four cars. No basement.

Your stand is steep, your forty eight apartments need about seventy two bays, and one basement level gives you twenty five. So the drawing says dig three. Ten metres into rock, then lighting, ventilation and fire escapes for the next sixty years, so somebody can walk down at eleven at night to fetch a car.

The WÖHR Parksafe 582 is a fully automatic parking system. The whole thing shows up on your ground floor as one doorway. Brushed steel, flush in the wall, wide enough for a car and for the doors to open.

You stop, switch off and get out. The doors close, the car settles onto a steel platform, a lift takes it down the shaft to the first free level, and a shuttle runs it sideways into place. Four cars to a level, two deep on either side, sixty four cars in a shaft twelve metres by seven and a half.

Nobody drives in there. Nobody walks in there. So nobody touches your car while it is parked, and nobody carries a sleeping child up three levels of a garage again. On the way out, a chip on your keyring brings it back to the doorway, turned to face the street.

Here is what it does to the site. Three basement levels take about seven thousand cubic metres out of the ground. The shaft takes about three thousand. Same building, same stand. You still get your seventy two bays, and the ground is still yours to use. A pool. A garden that is not the roof of a ramp. Two more units if the rights allow it.

None of it is fixed either. Underground as a shaft, above ground as a tower clad to match the building, or both. Two levels or seventeen. Eight cars or sixty six.

ATTPS supplies and installs WÖHR systems for developers and architects in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, and hands over a working system.

Your bicycle tower can pay for itself.A Bikesafe tower solves the secure bicycle storage problem, and it opens a revenue...
11/08/2026

Your bicycle tower can pay for itself.

A Bikesafe tower solves the secure bicycle storage problem, and it opens a revenue line for the landowner at the same time.

Our previous post covers how the Bikesafe works. The revenue opportunity on the outside of it might be the bigger story.

Picture one at Stellenbosch University. The tower stands 11.8 metres high and 8.6 metres across, on a main pedestrian route through campus, with several thousand students passing it on foot and by bicycle every day. In outdoor media terms that is a strong site: high frequency, long dwell time, clean sight lines on the approach, and an audience that comes back twice a day, five days a week, for four years.

The structure can carry a full wrap or a single panel for advertisers, illuminated from the inside or not. The format follows the site and the client.

ATTPS can manage the advertising side for you. Some owners prefer to run it in-house, others hand it to a media owner on a revenue share. Whichever route you take, the money comes back to you, and it comes back every month for the life of the structure.

Your finance director will ask what it earns. That answer is what gets this project approved.

The same logic applies to a station forecourt in Cape Town, an office park in Sandton or a mixed-use precinct on the Durban beachfront. Anywhere the structure lands on a route people already walk.

Urban mobility, funded by the structure delivering it.

Reclaim Space, Recover Costs | Parking Solutions for South Africa | ATTPS

10/08/2026

Locked away. Out of sight. Back in 16 seconds.

Your campus already has students cycling in. What it does not have is somewhere those bicycles are genuinely safe.

Stellenbosch is the obvious example. The university runs bicycle sheds with student card access, the SRC has said openly there are not enough of them, and bicycles keep going missing anyway. Every stolen bicycle is one more student who drives in tomorrow.

The WÖHR Bikesafe is the finished version of that idea. Think of a safe with a German-engineered bike lift inside it.

A student rides in from home to one point on campus, steps up to a small booth, and rolls the bicycle onto two rails until the wheels stop. A door slides open and draws it through. One tap of a student card, and the machine lifts the bicycle to a shelf inside. Coming back, one tap brings it down, and the bicycle is back in an average of 16 seconds.

A R100 000 road bike sits behind locked doors where nobody can see it or reach it. Bags and baskets go in with the bicycle, so books are not carried from lecture to lecture. E-bikes charge while they are locked away. Everyday bicycles, road and racing bikes, mountain bikes and e-bikes all fit.

There are two versions, and Stellenbosch shows why both exist. The core campus between Andringa and Marais is heritage protected, so there we can go underground: eight levels of shaft excavated below ground, nothing above it but the entry booth, and nothing changed on the skyline. The eastern hostel precinct off Victoria and Merriman is newer ground, so there we can go up: a tower of 11.8 metres over eight levels, roughly four storeys, on a round base 8.6 metres across and wrapped all the way round. A tower where several thousand students walk past every day is a well-placed billboard, and the campus owns that space and earns the revenue generated.

128 bicycles in the shaft, 122 in the tower. 250 secure places, standing on about 100 square metres of ground. The same 250 students arriving by car would need around 7500 square metres of parking floor.

Campuses are the clearest case, but the same footprint works at a station forecourt in Cape Town, an office park in Sandton, or a residential estate on the KwaZulu-Natal north coast.

ATTPS supplies and installs across South Africa, and hands over a working system.

04/08/2026

At least 30% of inner-city traffic is drivers who have reached their destination and can’t find anywhere to park.

Anyone who drives into the Cape Town C*D on a weekday knows the feeling. You reach the building in twenty minutes, then spend another ten going around the block.

Traditional parking hasn’t changed in decades. A car needs 12.5 m² to stand still. Add the aisle it drives down and the ramp it drives in on, and a space in a conventional underground garage works out at roughly 35 m². Most of that area isn’t holding a car. It’s letting one move.

An automated system takes the driving out. No aisles, no ramps, no turning circles, because the driver never goes in. WÖHR’s own comparisons put the same parking space at 12 to 22 m², depending on the system. Roughly half the land, same number of cars.

Parking has always been the line item that eats the site. Let us engineer the parking and you choose the outcome. More cars in the same footprint, or the same number of cars and land back for the building. Fewer people circling the block, and a C*D built for urban living rather than car storage.

ATTPS is the exclusive Africa partner for WÖHR Autoparksysteme.



Source: ADAC, March 2022

Same slab. No excavation. Most of that driving lane becomes parking.Your basement holds 30 bays. Your development needs ...
03/08/2026

Same slab. No excavation. Most of that driving lane becomes parking.

Your basement holds 30 bays. Your development needs closer to 60. And there is no second level to dig under a building that is already standing.

Here is the part nobody points out. A driving lane is like a hotel corridor. With bays on both sides it works twice over. With a wall, a ramp or the site boundary opposite, it works once, and you paid for all of it either way. Architects do not choose that. Site shape forces it on them, and almost every basement has stretches of it.

On typical South African dimensions a bay is 2.5 m by 5 m and a lane about 6 m wide. Roughly a third of a well planned parking floor ends up lane rather than parking, and closer to half where the lane serves one side only. A single lane 6 m wide and 40 m long is 240 m² of concrete nobody can park on.

The WÖHR Parking Platform 601 turns most of that back into bays. WÖHR has been engineering parking systems in Germany since 1959.

Each car parks on a flat steel platform that rolls sideways on rails set into the floor. The platforms line up in rows, one behind the other, up to four deep. Every row keeps one empty gap, and that gap is what makes it work. A resident taps their electronic tag, the platforms in front slide sideways into the gap, a clear path opens, and they drive out. Nobody waits on a neighbour and nobody hands over keys, and the car stays at floor level throughout, never lifted and never trapped.

So one access route serves a whole group of rows instead of a lane in front of every second row. That 240 m² lane becomes a row of about 14 cars, and the cars are not squeezed to do it. The platform is 250 to 280 cm wide against a typical South African bay of 250 cm.

For the developer, the parking requirement is met without a second basement level, so the excavation, the concrete and the months never happen. Every apartment sells with its own allocated bay, reached across a flat floor with no ramp and no ledge. Charging points can be added later.

Two things to check early. The floor has to be exceptionally level, so an existing basement starts with a floor survey and usually a thin levelling screed. And the 601 is built around allocated bays for residents and staff, so a scheme keeps a small conventional visitor section, as most do anyway.

ATTPS supplies and installs WÖHR parking systems across South Africa, from Umhlanga and the KZN north coast to Cape Town's Atlantic Seaboard and Sandton. We look at your floor before anything else, and we hand over a working system.

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