02-20-2019, 07:46 AM
(02-20-2019, 01:33 AM)plam Wrote: I was reading about, I think, Seattle. Employees who have to pay $12/day to park will shift their modal share to transit. It has to be billed on a per day basis though. Apparently we don't account for monthly bills. Maybe that would work at the universities too.
That would be good for the universities anyway. UW has a bizarre mix of under- and over-charging for parking. On the one hand, employee parking is $43/month, which really isn’t very much and leads to waiting lists for preferred lots (note, too, that the rate is the same for every lot, even though some lots and parking spaces are more valuable than others). On the other hand, parking for one day is $5 or $6 in most cases. So those monthly people have zero incentive to car pool or take other transportation some days; and even if somebody only needs to park 2 days per week they’re still better off getting a monthly pass.
There is also a free lot a bit further away, but it’s always free so sometimes it fills up. Meanwhile, there are acres of convenient staff parking that I can’t use even at 6AM on a Saturday when they are empty. And incidentally the (empty) visitor parking is still $6 at that time.
What they should do is eliminate the monthly pass and just charge everywhere SFPark-style. The only exception I can see at all is that it probably makes sense to somehow guarantee employees a parking spot when events like convocation occur. Of course what we actually do is allow free parking at those times, which must make the economists at the University crazy.