Long before Cleveland City Hall made the decision to charge Clevelanders more to park downtown, City Council entertained a quiet piece of parking overhaul that predated its scrapping of meters two-and-a-half years ago.
What became law in September 2023 essentially was a granting of power: the Director of Public Works, John Laird, can increase the rate people pay to park downtown anywhere from $1 to $8. And on what days, at which times, and in which specific zones.
That’s what Laird did recently; beginning sometime this year, parking rates in Downtown and Ohio City will jump from $1 to $1.50. Drivers parking for four hours—the new limit—will have to shell out $10.50 in sum. And now, that includes weekends, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. (save for Sunday in Ohio City), for what was once free.
The move seems contradictory to basic economics: Why is the city, one that is struggling to fill vacant retail spaces and rehab or sell its vacant buildings, increasing the price of entry for the vast majority of Northeast Ohioans who come to the city center by car?
“You have to understand we really only had one goal,” Lucas Reeve, a senior advisor to Mayor Bibb, who helped architect the new parking policy, told Scene recently at City Hall. “To have parking be predictable and available when and where people need it.”
Reeve, along with his co-policy maker, Matt Moss, a senior strategist of Thriving Communities, maintains that months of thought went into the choice to charge parkers for something they once got for free. Or for a cheaper rate. Or for fewer hours on the weekday.
Both men subscribe to the philosophy of Donald Shoup, the late San Francisco academic often considered to be the country’s foremost expert on parking.
Shoup argues in his book The High Cost of Free Parking in favor of what’s called demand-responsive parking. It’s a theory that operates like a triangle, where city planners can only pick two out of three—parking can be free and convenient, Shoup’s aphorism went, but it can’t be available. (Or available and free, but not convenient.)
“And so if you want to make parking more available and convenient,” Moss said, “price in the only tool to do that.”
Cleveland’s new rates are actually pretty average when it comes to leaving a car in a Midwestern city center.
Detroit charges a buck an hour until 10 p.m. on most nights. In Indianapolis, it’s $2 per hour until 11 p.m. In Pittsburgh, rates can climb up to $3 an hour, yet parking—unlike in Cleveland shortly—is free after 6 p.m. (In all three cities, there’s no charge on Sundays.)
Yet Moss and Reeve’s experiment will play out during a tougher time in general for transportation.
Late last year, RTA announced that it would be cutting its budget for 2026, which means a drop in service. And Cleveland Moves, the city’s plan to stake out 50 miles of high-comfort bike lanes around town, has only two protected lanes downtown (slivers of Huron and Prospect) to show so far.
Which means Moss and Reeve are gambling with demand. Three out of every four cars that come downtown and park on the street originate outside Cleveland, city data shows. Out-of-towners, therefore, are Downtown’s main customer.
“The city has been catering to suburbanites for decades and it hasn’t worked,” one commented on Reddit.
“It’s penny pinching,” another said. “You don’t GROW a ‘business’ by cutting ease-of-access costs. Same way you wouldn’t raise RTA prices and expect more people to use it.”
But behavior over the next year could spell otherwise. After all, Moss told Scene, the virtue of their ParkMobile system is the ability to track data regarding where people tend to park, at which times of day—and adjust prices accordingly. San Francisco fluctuates its parking zones this way.
New York City, after a year of charging drivers $9 to drive into parts of Manhattan, recently called the initiative a success. Traffic fell by 11 percent; crashes were reduced by 7 percent. Fewer cars on the street resulted in more open and available spots.
And like in New York, where congestion-fee revenue added a half billion dollars to the city’s transit system, Cleveland could profit intelligently from those extra parking fees.
The extra revenue from this year’s parking increase, Reeve said, will head into a “special fund” that can only be spent on “mobility and safety” — things like better crosswalks, new bike lanes and speed tables, crisper street lighting.
“Again, the goal isn’t revenue,” Moss stated. “But to the extent that we have revenue that exceeds what we need to run the program? We’re gonna return it back to the streets.”
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