“Cheap park­ing” in Den­ver has long meant avoid­ing lots and garages and cruis­ing the streets to find a meter where a vehi­cle could be stashed for the low price of a buck per hour.

In Jan­u­ary 2022, for the first time in two decades, the city is upping park­ing rates, dou­bling the cost of street park­ing to $2 per hour. (That breaks down to 50 cents for a 15-minute, in-and-out trip.)

That’s still a bar­gain in many cas­es but with most of the city’s 6,200 meters sub­ject to two-hour lim­its (move it or risk a tick­et), there are plen­ty of rea­sons to con­sid­er off-street alternatives.

With that in mind, here are some tips on how to find avail­able, cheap park­ing in Denver:

Let a parking app or website do the hunting

Sea­soned park­ers tend to have their favorite spots and hid­den gems around town. At the rate that Den­ver has been den­si­fy­ing in recent years, there’s no guar­an­tee those spaces will be avail­able long term.

The Col­orado Rock­ies “West Lot,” for decades pro­vid­ed a con­ve­nient, near­by option for peo­ple head­ing to game at Coors Field. It ceased to exist in 2018 and has since been trans­formed into McGre­gor Square, a mas­sive com­bo hotel-office-con­do project where hourly park­ing is scarce.

There are a hand­ful of com­pa­nies that traf­fic in real-time Den­ver park­ing data and even allow dri­vers to reserve spots online, some­times at dis­counts. Those include Park­whiz, Parko­pe­dia and SpotHero. (All three offer mobile apps.)

Going on the 16th Street Mall? Parko­pe­dia knows that the Den­ver Pavilion’s ded­i­cat­ed under­ground lot has 800 spaces just off the mall. It also knows the day­time week­day rate in the lot is $4 an hour for the first two hours and $18 for up to 12 hours. Reserve through Parko­pe­dia and you can get two hours for $6.75 (as of the writ­ing of this article.)

Even local oper­a­tors like Laz Park­ing have online options that allow dri­vers to check avail­abil­i­ty in real-time and sign up for poten­tial­ly cost-sav­ing options like month­ly parking.

Park and ride

Parko­pe­dia knows that the cheap­est option for dri­vers look­ing to get down­town involves tak­ing some extra steps.

Specif­i­cal­ly, that means park­ing in one of the Region­al Trans­porta­tion District’s more than 70 Park-n-Ride lots and board­ing a bus or train to get clos­er to a final des­ti­na­tion. Most Park-N-Ride lots are free for 24 hours for peo­ple whose cars are reg­is­tered with­in RTD’s metro area-span­ning bound­aries. Charges apply to those with plates from out­side the boundaries.

From there, it’s a mat­ter of buy­ing a tick­et to ride. An unlim­it­ed day pass for RTD bus­es and trains was going for $10.50 in December.

Denver parking meters have an app

Since Feb­ru­ary 2021, the city of Den­ver has been offer­ing a mobile app for park­ers to man­age their metered spots.

Using the Pay­By­Phone app, peo­ple can pay their meter, get alerts when their time is about to expire and even add mon­ey to extend their stay as long as it’s with­in post­ed lim­its, offi­cials with the city’s Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion and Infra­struc­ture said.

For more details on the city’s meter rules, includ­ing var­i­ous rates for overnight stays in on-street spots, vis­it denvergor.org/parking and click on the street park­ing tab.