Almost everyone who books an extended stay with us asks some version of the same question in the first week: should I have brought the car?
It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that it depends on where you are going every day. But the costs are knowable, so here they are — real numbers from official sources, so you can do the arithmetic before you decide.
Monthly parking: roughly $140 to $160
The clearest benchmark downtown is the ABC Ramps, which are owned by the Minnesota Department of Transportation and managed by the City of Minneapolis. Their traditional monthly contract rates are $140 a month for Ramp A (101 North 9th Street) and $160 a month for Ramps B and C (516 and 318 2nd Avenue North). Contracts include in-and-out privileges across all three ramps, and all three are skyway-connected.
Private ramps and lots closer to the office towers generally run higher, and rates move around, so treat $140–$160 as the floor rather than the going rate. Either way, you are looking at somewhere north of $1,700 a year in parking alone before you have bought a single gallon of gas.
Then there is winter
This is the cost people from out of state do not see coming. When the City declares a Snow Emergency, parking rules change for three days in sequence, and they are strict.
Day 1 rules begin at 9 p.m. on snow emergency routes. Day 2 rules begin at 8 a.m. on the odd-numbered side of non-route streets — and between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. you are expected to move your car from the odd side to the even side. Day 3 rules begin at 8 a.m. again. Get it wrong and the car is ticketed and towed to the Minneapolis Impound Lot, where you pay a tow charge plus storage for every day it sits.
Minneapolis averages several snow emergencies a winter. Two bad ones can wipe out whatever you thought you were saving.
What the alternative actually costs
Now the other side of the ledger. A local bus or METRO fare is a flat $2 at all times, good for two and a half hours. An all-day pass is $4. Buses on Nicollet Mall are free, and any ride entirely inside the Downtown Zone is 50 cents.
Ride the bus twice a day, every weekday, for a month and you are at roughly $80 — about half of what one parking contract costs, and you are not shovelling anything out at 6 a.m.
Where we sit, and why it matters
Oakland’s on 9th is at 215 South 9th Street, in the middle of downtown. The skyway is one block away — you walk that block to reach it, we are not connected to it directly — and once you are in, you can cross most of the business district without a coat. Target on Nicollet Mall, the Armory, Orchestra Hall, Target Center, Target Field and U.S. Bank Stadium are all walkable, and both HCMC and the University of Minnesota Medical Center are close, which is why so many of our guests are travel nurses.
For that pattern of life — work downtown, groceries downtown, weekends downtown — a car is mostly a parked asset that you pay rent on.
When you probably should bring it
Be honest about your week. A car earns its keep if you are commuting to a suburban office park, covering multiple clinic sites, driving home most weekends, or hauling anything regularly. Transit is excellent radiating out of downtown and thinner going crosstown.
If you are somewhere in between, one useful trick is to arrive without the car for the first two weeks and see how often you actually miss it. Our studios are month-to-month with no contract, so nothing about your booking has to be decided in advance.
The short version
Parking starts around $140–$160 a month, snow emergencies add real risk of a tow, and transit runs $2 a ride or $4 a day with free buses on Nicollet Mall. For most downtown-centred stays, the numbers favour leaving the car at home.
More on the practical side of this: our guides to overnight parking downtown and whether you need a car at all go deeper, and what is included in a studio covers the rest of the monthly maths.
Questions about parking for a specific stay? Call us at (612) 314-5124 — or check availability and book a furnished studio for a night, a week, or a month.
Keep reading: Open Streets Minneapolis 2026: three car-free days you can reach without a car.