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I want to amplify on a portion of Bob Johnson’s June 27 comment
regarding “parking charges for worktrips.”  

The state should impose a $6 per day per parked car work parking
tax, allowing employers the flexibility to implement a much more
palatable combination of $2 per day parking charges combined with
$4 per day cashout. The tax should be gradually phased in,
starting at $1 per day and growing to $6 per day. The phasing
should start with large employers and gradually expand to cover
smaller employers. The phasing should begin within the state, but
gradually expand beyond state and national boundaries.  

This policy will reduce state CO2 by 6.3M tons per year.  

20 pages of detailed policy and implementation research can be
found at: http://www.cities21.org/paidParking.htm . This new,
improved parking charge/cashout policy comes from the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency’s “Transforming Office Parks into
Transit Villages” Study. 

$2 parking charge + $4 cashout policy summary:
* Start with $0.25 per day employee parking charges and $1.00 per
day employee cashout.  A cashout is where the employer pays
employees not to park at the office.    
* Employees are assured that all parking charge revenue goes to
fund cashout. 
* Charges and cashout increase gradually over time (to $2.00 and
$4.00 per day) as other companies adopt the same program, ensuring
that no Human Resources (HR) recruiting/retention disadvantage is
created. (If Company A and Company B are competitors, and if A
charges $2 for parking and B has free parking, then B has a "$2
per day" recruiting advantage over A.  Hence, both A and B have to
participate for the proposal to work.)  
* Implement monthly employee reporting via a trust-based,
self-reporting HR web applet (one Bay Area company uses this
approach).  Incorporate other employer commute benefits into this
monthly reporting (Commuter Check - pre-tax transit passes,
private WiFi express bus service, etc) to ensure that “double
benefits” are not provided to employees. Self-reporting makes
implementation very low-cost for employers. The company reports
that 20% of employees are under-collecting the cashout, validating
that company's trust in its employees.      
* Position “cashout + parking charges” as part of a comprehensive
employer commute reduction program.  Educate employees about the
unique behavior-changing/demand-reducing properties of parking
charges (23% commute mode shift is expected).  Besides reducing
CO2, this scheme will: a) ease severe parking shortages at some
office campuses, b) create real-estate in-fill opportunities (by
permanently reducing cars parked at offices, this scheme enables
smart new in-fill on land that was considered to be "built out"),
and c) motivate cities to reduce parking maximums for new office
development.   
* Parking spaces take up valuable land.  Employers have to pay for
parking space land used by drivers.  Employers save money when
workers commute via green alternatives (transit, car/van pool,
bike, walk, and telecommute) that do not require land for cars. 
Hence, Bay Area employers provide a hidden $7.59 daily subsidy to
SOV commuters.  This cashout + charges scheme reduces land
consumption, increasing the economic efficiency of employers. 
Further, the current policy of subsidizing SOV commuting harms the
environment.    
* "Charging for parking is the single most effective strategy to
encourage people to use alternatives to the SOV" - Jeff Tumlin,
Nelson Nygaard Associates.    


The policy should be revenue-neutral for business, provided cities
allow employers to monetize the freed surface parking real-estate.
The state should nurture and facilitate such monetization. From a
state budget perspective, “pricing policies” such as this are
three orders of magnitude more cost-effective for CO2 reduction
than proposals requiring capital expenditures. The state should
budget staff time to facilitate implementation. For employees,
this policy represents a small transfer payment from solo driving
commuters to users of commute alternatives.   

Two previous studies are relevant: A) A 1989 paper ("Parking
Subsidies and Commuter Mode Choice: Assessing the Evidence," by
Richard Willson, Donald Shoup, and Martin Wachs) finds commute
rewards are less effective than charges: "A program of transit and
vanpool subsidies as well as preferential parking for carpoolers
had little effect until [Twentieth Century Corporation in Los
Angeles] raised the price of employee parking from no charge to
$30 per month for solo drivers. Solo driving decreased from 90 to
65 percent after pricing."  B) A 1990 paper
("Proceedings--Commuter Parking Symposium" by Metro and
Association for Commuter Transportation, Seattle, Washington)
found that charges changed behavior where incentives had not:
"CH2M Hill in Bellevue, Washington began charging solo drivers $40
per month for parking, the amount the company pays the building
owner for parking. All employees receive a $40 per month travel
allowance in their paychecks. Carpoolers park for free. Walkers,
cyclists and drop offs keep the travel allowance. Solo driving
declined from 89 percent to 64 percent after the parking policies
were put into place."

LUSCAT staffers Jeff Weir and Panama Bartholomy are familiar with
this policy proposal/research.  

Original File Name:

Date and Time Comment Was Submitted: 2008-07-27 16:17:36