06-13-2018, 05:32 PM
(06-13-2018, 03:51 PM)Viewfromthe42 Wrote: I would say there's just a complete lack of effort on the part of most employers to shift behaviour. I've seen many people toss around numbers of $50K to build a structured parking spot. What's the monthly cost of that, and how many employers offer an equivalent financial incentive for their employees to instead carpool, take transit, bike, or walk? The absolute best effort I've seen was $70/month for those who did not drive. I can't imagine you can buy much real estate or parking for $70/month, but it seems a bit nuts that we will reward drivers with a benefit in the hundreds of dollars per month of value, but will offer nothing to those who remove that cost from the business.
OK, here’s a modest proposal: modify the zoning code to forbid parking as an ancillary use. By that, I mean that if the main use of the property is as offices, there cannot be parking on site. However, parking, including parking structures, would be a permitted use just about anywhere. So a company could buy a property and build an office building, and if they’re worried about the cost of parking, they could buy another property and operate a parking structure on it, open to all, operating at market rates. So there would be no problem with providing as much parking as can pay for itself, but the hidden cost of parking could not be spread around all employees.
Now, I don’t actually agree with this, because I disagree with highly intrusive zoning that goes way beyond regulating externalities and promoting good city planning and gets into micro-managing how property owners use their property. But compared to the parking minima and similar nonsense we have now, I don’t think it looks any worse.
Quite seriously, there isn’t really much point in discussing solutions until parking minima have been abolished. Most employers are probably required to supply excessive parking, so there isn’t much point in tracking who is using it and charging them for it. Once parking minima are gone, employers might start to look at their parking lots as development sites, and that would change the calculation on parking policy pretty significantly: right now the subsidy from non-parkers is really mostly hypothetical, in that even if everybody stopped driving the company couldn’t actually do anything different with the parking lot. Without parking minima, a reduction in parking would translate into extremely valuable land becoming available for development.