What does DTK need?

[ijmorlan]

I agree! Heck, I'd even be happy with transit passes being offered to those who don't use parking (instead of a cash out). My biggest pet peeve with my employer (UW) is that a monthly parking pass is much, much cheaper than a transit pass, even with the discounted Corporate Pass. Now, a transit pass does give you transit access even when away from work, but I feel at a bare minimum parking should be the same cost (or more) than transit. Especially given UW's parking woes (pre-pandemic). They need to make transit far more appealing (and could do so, relatively easily, I think).

UW’s (also my employer) parking pricing is bonkers. They have a lot at Seagram LRT station which is always free, even on class days when it fills up; they have lots on campus which charge $6 for the day, whether you arrive at 08:30 and stay for the entire day or if you arrive at 20:30 when it’s almost empty and are just there for the evening. But most prominently, they have cheap parking passes available to employees which I believe are approximately the same price as parking in the daily parking lots for 2-3 days a week.

In other words, there is no incentive whatsoever to avoid parking, unless you can get your parking down to just a couple of days a week. Somebody needing to park at 18:00 to attend an event at Fed Hall pays the full-day price to park in a mostly-empty lot for a couple of hours; unless they are one of those pass holders (in other words, a subsidized high user of parking), in which case they pay nothing.

Additionally, there is a complicated system of waitlists and allocation to determine which lots a person can use.

If it were up to me, I would replace the entire system with something like SFPark: rates adjusted based on location and time of the week. High enough to keep a few spaces open almost all the time, lower at low demand places and times, all the way down to $0 at extremely low demand times. Parking under Needles Hall would end up very expensive; X lot and the aforementioned Seagram lot would remain relatively cheap and probably free at many times. There might be exceptions for special events such as convocation but the general rule would be market pricing in some form.