Despite the withdrawal of plans for a Sports Illustrated resort, someday something will get built on the city parking lot on S. Ashley, also known as the Kline’s Lot by those who remember the Main St. department store it once served. But for the foreseeable future, good-natured Helen will be in the booth taking cash or credit cards for parking in the lot’s 140 spaces.
Ann Arbor has one metered parking lot, on S. Main, but its other thirteen lots, and all eight structures, have automated payment systems. The Downtown Development Authority’s new director, Maura Thomson, says that automated equipment will eventually be installed at S. Ashley, too.
For now, there are no plans to replace Helen (the DDA’s parking operator doesn’t allow employees to give their last names). But parkers will soon be paying her more. At $1.80 an hour, hers is already the city’s most expensive parking lot—and by 2026, the rate will rise 44 percent to $2.60.
With many offices still only partly occupied, fewer people are parking downtown, and the DDA is raising rates to compensate. Thomson says that post-pandemic, the Kline Lot is bringing in about $600,000 a year. While nighttime demand has largely recovered, “our demand during the day is much less than before the pandemic,” she says. Overall, the system is currently “at about seventy-five percent of parking revenue, and our best guess is that’s our new normal.”
In response, Thomson says, the authority “just finished a comprehensive parking rate study … We took a really deep dive into expenditures [and] utilization over the last year, and we are adjusting our rate so that that 75 percent is enough for us to meet our obligations.” Parking meters will also go up from $2.20 an hour to $2.60 in 2026, and structure parking from $1.20 to $1.80.
“The hourly rate in the structures hadn’t been touched since 2012,” Thomson points out. “And when you think about costs of labor, the cost of goods and services—I mean, we weren’t even meeting inflation!”
