Parking in Perspective
Understanding Ann Arbor’s over-efficient parking system
—By Patty McLeod
Living in Ann Arbor comes with many benefits. Most parts of the city are walkable, public transportation is prevalent and easily accessible, and there’s a diverse and vibrant gathering of students and citizens alike. However, as many students discover their first year, bringing a car to campus is not easy. While there are parking meters and structures aplenty, these options fill quickly. It’s not uncommon to find oneself driving in circles, looking for any open spot to take advantage of.
The city offers over 8,000 spaces through metered street parking, parking structures, and parking lots. However, Ann Arbor is a busy community, with thousands of people coming in and out daily. This is only exacerbated by the sheer size of the university population, which is growing so significantly that new dorms are currently under construction, expected to be finished by the fall of 2026. This means that any open spaces do not stay available for long. For example, around the Ross building, metered spaces are seldom vacant, and in surrounding neighborhoods, the streets are rarely anything less than packed. As sophomore student James Harvey notes, “Trying to park anywhere on campus is a nightmare.” So why is it so hard to bring a car to Ann Arbor?
Problems with parking
The foremost reason for this lack of availability is simply the high demand. Spaces close to U-M are used by students daily. The majority of businesses throughout the downtown area provide little to no parking. Such congestion feeds itself. During the week, trips into the city are sure to be affected by extended searches for available spaces. This search, also known as cruising for parking, can account for up to half of all traffic during the busiest hours in metropolitan locations. University of Michigan professor of urban and regional planning Jonathan Levine says, “The problem is that parking separates people, separates land uses, and makes sure that you need a car for every purpose because things are so far away from one another.” If the city were to meet citizens’ parking demands by building more structures or adding more street spaces, it would only put more physical distance between the population and their daily destinations.
The Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority, or the DDA, is a city organization which manages the improvement of the city’s busy downtown through construction planning and managing parking and transit systems. Facing this high demand, a simple solution would be to offer more parking, allowing anyone who needs it a place to leave their car. However, the DDA’s executive director, Maura Thomson, says the group has “no plans to provide further parking construction” any time soon. Although it sounds like a plan that would exacerbate the city’s traffic problems, it’s quite the opposite. Parking saturation is an inefficient use of city space and resources. It’s ingrained in the way urban infrastructure is planned. Cost of parking affects this demand as well; in Ann Arbor, road parking is kept at $2.20 an hour. Lower prices make parking more accessible to drivers, keeping them frequently in use. Ceasing construction of further parking structures is a move that has the city’s best interests at heart. By preventing increased saturation of parking in Ann Arbor, the DDA can work to lower the demand for parking.
The way public parking systems are structured in Ann Arbor is reminiscent of the broader reliance on cars and driving in the United States. Modern city infrastructures are designed to prioritize car traffic over shared transportation, and as a result public train systems have been declining for decades. A majority of our railways are used for freight purposes, and the implementation of light-rail trains in Europe and Asia further leave our trains behind. Many factors must be considered to effectively combat an issue like a lack of parking availability. Parking, public transportation, housing affordability and accessibility, and traffic rates go hand-in-hand in urban planning.
No housing without parking
Another issue the city struggles with is its housing market. Rent prices for Ann Arbor are high—less than a quarter of the city’s apartments lease for under $1,500 a month. The housing problem is directly intertwined with the parking problems that residents face. Affordability issues mean more people seek housing farther from campus, across Ann Arbor and into Ypsilanti. These distances all but require these residents to drive to their classes or their jobs.
For those who do live in the city, parking is not always a guarantee with housing. Most apartments do have designated spaces, but those spaces can run tight. For example, a building just south of U-M’s central campus offers multiple 4-6 bedroom units, but only has 2-3 spaces set aside per unit. If everyone who rents one of these units brings a car, that means a majority of tenants will have to find street parking or make other accommodations. In addition, most units charge extra for their spaces. With rent prices consistently high as-is, an extra bill upwards of $400 for the school year is a lot for many students.
The city is making efforts to improve housing at all socioeconomic levels. By creating more residence spaces within Ann Arbor, keeping them closer to school and commercial areas, the average commute will be shorter and less car-intensive. According to an analysis at Ghent University in Belgium, cars providing fast, cheap transportation has influenced urban sprawl greatly. The prioritization of closely structured, transportation-heavy housing and business sectors both removes the obligation for long-distance travel and reduces anxieties about keeping that travel cost-efficient. To effectively combat car dependency in Ann Arbor, it’s vital that the need for lengthy commutes is decreased.
This process is expected to be lengthy. In order to make Ann Arbor’s affordable housing more affordable, the residence requirements of all citizens must be met. More expensive housing needs to exist so that those who can afford it can take advantage of it. In facilitating this, the city hopes to alleviate some of the demand on lower-income residences, with a goal of keeping those prices low when more affordable housing is made available. They’re not alone in these efforts—many current housing developments are the result of partnerships with real estate organizations, like Avalon Housing working on a series of apartments in the Kerrytown district. Additionally, speaking for the Downtown Development Authority, Thomson said, “the DDA separately supports the work of the AAHC through investing in infrastructure to support their projects and through housing grants.” These issues are so interwoven that it is imperative they work together to efficiently provide solutions for everyone.
Adapting and improving
The easiest way to resolve our public parking congestion is to stop driving. That, however, is not an eventuality anytime soon. As many people live outside the limits of Ann Arbor, they have no choice but to drive. Many U-M students moving from Michigan or surrounding states bring their cars to Ann Arbor with them, increasing the number of vehicles and traffic. Driving is a central facet of public life. As much as citywide public transportation can be tweaked and improved, there are always reasons to drive instead. Cultural reluctance to move away from cars poses a great obstacle for any progress with improving transit systems. In metropolitan areas across the United States, private car travel is responsible for 86% of all travel. These cities are built with car transportation in mind, and the separation between residential and commercial districts keeps citizens in need of private vehicles for their daily commutes. In order to bypass the need for cars, we need transit infrastructure which can fully replace them.
In the interim, ride-sharing is a popular alternative. Companies like Uber or Lyft remain convenient ways to get around for many. While these services may be good on paper, they can be detrimental to the improvement of public transit. Ride-sharing tends to cause a decline in transit use, by around six percent for buses and three percent for railways. In a time when we want to focus on improving our transportation systems, a move away from buses and rails can only impede progress. In addition, relying on ride-sharing systems is hardly financially viable. For example, a single trip from Ypsilanti to the U-M campus can run at least $20—take that twice a day every school day, and even a week of transportation is a daunting price.
Ann Arbor has been working to address issues with transportation for some time. The TC1, or Transit Corridor zoning, is planned to increase development density while providing comprehensive public transportation services to a wider area. Actively working against more parking space may seem counterintuitive, but it can be useful. Saving that space means it can be repurposed for something else more beneficial to the city, like housing or business development. In removing the focus from cars and car parking, the city can promote its public transit as more of an alternative rather than a supplementary form of transportation. In a 2016 study from the University of New Orleans, Sandip Chakrabarti found that the biggest factors affecting the choice of car travel over transit are reliability and accessibility. Knowing that a transit system is limited to just a few minutes of deviation from its schedule, for example, caused a 2.6 times increase in the choice for public transit services.
This zoning is important for limiting the demand for parking. Talking to Levine about the TC1 project, it’s clear that providing the zoning is only a piece of the puzzle: “[Ann Arbor] invests a lot in transit, but if we keep development densities low, in areas that are well-served by transit, and if we keep parking requirements high, then we’re almost guaranteed not to get the full use of our transit system.” TC1 thus aims to promote mixed-use housing. This housing is best seen in apartments like Vic Village North, where properties are located on the floors above business spaces. By keeping residences and commercial spaces close, prospective residents will have less reasons for continued car use.
Thomson also described a Circulation Study the DDA is currently conducting. Some of the goals of this study are to look at prospective solutions for traffic congestion, such as expanding accommodations for cyclists. Another point of interest is the institution of “transit priority” lanes, creating more designated paths for buses and alleviating congestion for cars. In a presentation describing the organization’s study, they emphasized the need for “flexible design” in urban planning. This idea, the DDA reports, was spurred in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw a shift in the use of city streets—think street closures during the summer for outdoor dining.
The city also recently changed its policy on residential parking, allowing developers to decide how many spaces will best suit their projects instead of meeting city quotas. One such development at Maiden Lane and Broadway is a prime example of the benefits of this change. Two apartment buildings have been completed, with a third still under construction. The parking policy changed between the construction of the second and third buildings, meaning the first two have city-determined parking spaces. The third, however, will be allocated spaces by the developer. Levine details how rather than building additional parking, these apartments can utilize the existing structure; he notes it “never was more than two-thirds full” at any given time. In turn, this means that there is space to build more apartments instead of another parking structure.
Ann Arbor may set ambitious goals for itself, Levine says, but these goals are interconnected in creating a better community for all its citizens. In order to fix these issues, however, the work can not just come from legislation or urban planning work. As citizens, there is a need to adjust the thought processes about our vehicles. Be it using more public transportation, carpooling, or walking or biking, if able, any motion away from driving is a positive motion to strengthen our community. The best way for Ann Arbor’s parking shortage to resolve is for people to stop driving, but in order to do that, we have to address the systems that require us to drive in the first place. “Cities are for people, not for cars.”
Feature photo; busy street across from the LSA building, by Patty McLeod