The truck court is the paved apron between the dock face and the yard perimeter – the space where trailers reverse onto dock levellers, park and circulate. US guides treat about 37 metres (120 feet) as the working minimum, while UK institutional specifications have moved from 40-50 metres towards 55 metres and beyond. It is the one specification that can never be retrofitted: the building can gain doors and mezzanines, but the yard cannot grow.
The apron that decides whether the shed works
Every loading operation lives or dies in the same rectangle of asphalt or concrete. The truck court runs from the building’s dock face to the opposite edge of the yard – a fence, a parking row, another unit – and everything a vehicle does on site happens inside it: the approach, the swing, the reverse onto the dock, the wait for a slot, the trailer drop. A functional court is really four zones stacked into one another: the immediate dock approach where the vehicle straightens, a circulation aisle behind it, trailer parking stalls where loads wait decoupled, and – in well-planned parks – a separated car route so employees never cross a reversing articulated vehicle. When those zones overlap because the apron is shallow, every arriving vehicle blocks the aisle, every shunt move waits for the previous one, and the warehouse behind the doors slows to the speed of its worst manoeuvre.
The numbers: how deep is deep enough
Conventions differ by market but converge on the same order of magnitude. US industrial guides treat 120 feet – roughly 37 metres – as the standard depth for a court serving full-size semi-trailers, with newer developments specified at 130 to 135 feet (roughly 40 to 41 metres). In the UK, a 2017 trade review in Logistics Manager recorded the shift: the traditional institutional specification included yards 40 to 50 metres deep, while Prologis described a push from 50 metres as standard to 55, with some schemes reaching 65 metres. The geometry behind those figures is European law plus arithmetic – our own worked example, labelled as such. Directive 96/53/EC caps an articulated combination at 16.50 metres and requires it to turn within a 12.5-metre outer radius. A reversing tractor-trailer therefore needs its own length, plus swing room, plus clearance past whatever stands on the far side of the aisle – stack a parked trailer of similar length opposite and the mid-40-metre range stops looking generous and starts looking exact.
Why depth is the spec you cannot fix
Most specifications can be negotiated after completion. Doors can be cut into a facade, levellers upgraded, racking reconfigured, a mezzanine inserted; even floor load capacity can be locally strengthened. The yard is different: its far edge is the site boundary, a neighbouring unit or land someone else controls, and no lease clause deepens it. That permanence collides with the direction of modern operations. The same 2017 Prologis commentary noted door ratios moving from one per 10,000 square feet towards one per 5,000 – twice the doors along the same facade means twice the simultaneous movements the apron must absorb. Cross-docking sharpens the point further: a flow-through building needs full-depth courts on both long sides, which is why converted single-sided sheds so often fail as cross-dock sites. And e-commerce operations add trailer storage pressure, since goods increasingly wait in parked trailers rather than on racking. A court sized for the door count of 2005 meets the vehicle movements of 2026 with nowhere to put them.
The lease angle: whose problem is the yard
In a single-let unit the yard is usually demised to the tenant – exclusive, but also the tenant’s to manage. In multi-tenant parks the court is often shared circulation space controlled by the landlord, and that distinction decides real money. Resurfacing, line marking, lighting, gates and barriers typically flow through the service charge in shared yards; in a demised yard the repairing clause decides, and a full repairing lease can hand the tenant a resurfacing bill at exit through the reinstatement provisions. Three questions belong in the heads of terms before the rate is agreed. First: is the yard demised or shared, and if shared, what happens when a neighbour’s peak overlaps yours? Second: how many trailer parking positions are included, and are they marked and enforceable? Third: who maintains the surface, and to what standard – a court pocked with potholes destroys landing gear and dock shelters faster than any other defect. A cheap rent on a unit whose apron cannot hold your vehicle schedule is not a cheap rent.
The Slovak angle: check it on site, not on the plan
Slovak Grade-A parks along the D1 corridor generally follow the institutional playbook – as our dock entry notes, the convention of at least one dock position per 1,000 square metres of hall space (AS Real Estate) implies a long dock face, and a long dock face implies a court to serve it. The site-visit checklist is short and unforgiving. Measure the clear depth, not the drawn one: landscaping strips, sprinkler tanks, gatehouses and informally parked cars all eat apron. Watch the shared aisles in multi-tenant configurations at a busy hour – the plan shows geometry, the visit shows conflict. Check the gradient and drainage, because a court that ponds in October is an ice sheet in January. And ask where the queue forms when four vehicles arrive in the same slot: if the answer is the public road, the municipality will eventually make that your problem. None of this appears in the brochure specification, which is precisely why it belongs on your inspection list.
Frequently Asked Questions
How deep should a truck court be?
For full-size articulated vehicles, treat roughly 37 metres (the 120-foot US convention) as the working minimum and 50 metres and up as the comfortable institutional standard – UK specifications have moved from 40-50 metres towards 55. Shallower aprons can serve rigid trucks and vans, but not an articulated fleet at pace.
Is the truck court the same as the yard?
The yard is everything outside the building inside the fence; the court is the working part of it – the manoeuvring and docking apron. A site can have a large yard and still fail operationally if buildings, parking rows or landscaping pinch the working depth in front of the docks.
Can a warehouse operate with a 30-metre apron?
Sometimes – with skilled drivers, single-file scheduling and no trailer parking opposite the docks. But every reverse becomes a multi-move manoeuvre, throughput drops, and damage to trailers, dock equipment and the building edge rises. For a modern articulated operation it is a compromise you price in, not a detail you ignore.
Who pays for maintaining the truck court?
In shared yards the landlord maintains and recovers through the service charge; in demised yards the lease’s repairing clause governs, and a full repairing lease can make the surface the tenant’s liability including at handback. Check which regime applies and what condition is recorded at the start of the term.
Do trailer parking spaces count towards the depth?
No – they compete with it. A trailer stall on the far side of the aisle stands exactly where a reversing vehicle needs clearance. Well-designed courts either deepen the apron to hold both or move trailer storage to a separate area of the site.