Lyft’s Radical Experiment in Charging for Free Parking
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The alternative from my company versus the parking subsidy is a free unlimited public transit card. Most people choose to take either light rail or bus, and choose their living situations so as to take advantage of those options.
1. 53 top bidders pay and get their spot.
2. total money collected is shared between everyone who doesn't park
Its a win win for all. People know that they always able to park. Price for lot goes up every month by itself, because there is less and less free space around office. Charity goes up as well.
If you want to alleviate wage disparity, target it directly, not just one tiny symptom.
This example is conflating the market for charity donations with parking. If I was going to donate $10k/month to charity anyway, I’d bid $5k a month on the parking (not sure how tax would work).
Every 3 month there is a report from company on what have been done for money from parking.
When I worked in SF, it took 45 minutes to drive there, and an hour and 15 minutes to get their by train+bus. Assuming I got on the express train.
On a bad day (missed the express train, had to wait up to an hour for a slow all-stops local train), transit could take over 2 hours.
Nope, parent poster said explicitly "Money from auction goes in pool and split between everyone who doesnt park."
I'd like to see the same kind of idea with moving violations. It's wronging the communities they're cited in; it should go back to us, directly. Not to some enforcement arm that buys MRAPS and shit.
It does.
There is a reasonable argument that such fees should go to the general fund for the locality, not to some specific department like law enforcement (because of incentives).
But I do not think there is a reasonable argument that the money should "go back to us, directly" rather than going to the local government. I mean, if you REALLY wanted your tax bill to come with two extra lines on it:
> Refund due to collections from legal enforcement: $ -54.36
> Additional charges for operating costs: $ 54.36
...but I HOPE you are bright enough to realize that the net difference between showing these lines on the tax bill and not showing them is meaningless and that there is little benefit to bothering to list it that way.
The problem is when government is opaque, we get things like "Govt services are horrible, blablabla". Whereas if funding wasn't in omnibus bills and covered up, we could see "Yes, their performance is low cause they are understaffed and working on a shoestring budget. They couldn't even afford office supplies."
I mean seriously, we value provenance in software with tools like Git. Why not Government and expenditure calculations? I certainly see a value there, regardless the party.
Pooling all revenue, from both taxes and fines, would make budgeting more complex as the tax rate would need to fluctuate with the expectation of fines, including the ones from new legislation. Any new fine legislation would thus be a tax bill by side-effect.
1cB Explain everyone that now the auction result (list of bidders and bids) is secret and people should just trust you.
Not all things are the same, especially not houses and parking lots.
Most likely, there would be legal issues with instituting this sort of structure, so it wouldn't make sense from a liability standpoint.
Maybe it smells too capitalistic?
By the way I'm not sure about the capitalistic label. The recipients would do nothing to earn the money, did they?
There's lots of auction theory describing good ways to sell things like parking spaces.
I live in Munich now and the difference in urban design is unbelievably stark. Munich is built to handle a variety of transportation modes well. American cities are basically just designed for cars, with other modes being an afterthought.
This isn't popular here, but I have been indoctrinated by environmental bullshit as a kid and teen and I am done with that. I pay high gas taxes and if that can't more than offset the environmental impact whomever is in charge should be fired for incompetence.
Edit: comment predicated on the assumption that this is in California, where Lyft is located
No, you don't pay high taxes, and second, political forces are such that gas taxes can not be raised to what they should be to prevent your "firing for incompetence." The politics don't work that way.
If you have any doubts, throw all your greenbacks into a volcano and let us know if it stops erupting.
This isn't popular here, but I have been indoctrinated by pro-car bullshit as a kid and I am done with that.
I know that's not the point of the article, but if your company owns ~25% of the market share [1], wouldn't it make more sense to instead give your employees "Lyft credits" (or whatever it's called), and have them use the service on a near-daily basis.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/06/13/uber-mar...
First off, I'm pretty sure that the value of the credit would be taxable, in the same way that wages are taxable.
Specifically, see IRS Publication 15B Section 2, the sub-section on Transportation (Commuting) Benefits (https://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html#en_US_2017_p...). Lyft credits don't to me appear to be one of the four "Qualified Transportation Benefits" (although paid parking _is_). Nor would it be a de minimis benefit.
(To be clear, I'm talking US tax law, as a US corporation.)
So, if it's going to be taxed, then you (as the Lyft employee) now have something which you _have_ to use, or else you're going to lose money (in that you've paid taxes for a benefit you're not using). That's a pressure that I'd personally not want to be under.
Similarly, I wonder if a permanent discount (all Lyft employees get 50% off) would also be taxable. Since this is all electronic, I don't think it would be that hard to track an employee's Lyft usage, so I don't think the de minimis exception would apply here. Then, come each paycheck, I'd have to remember "Oh, right, I have less money this pay period because I did all those extra Lyfts over the weekend."
Continuing the thought experiment, if Lyft did do this, then I most definitely would _not_ want to work or live near Lyft's offices. The reason is, any time I'd want to use Lyft, I'd be competing with all of the Lyft employees who are also using the service. I could see that increasing the chances of surge pricing switching on. That could maybe be minimized by nudging drivers to congregate around Lyft's office, but that would then deprive other areas of drivers.
So too many problems, in my opinion.
Lyft and Uber have already solved this. They've partnered with a bunch of the employee-benefit debit-card providers so that people can use employer-provided commute benefits. The guidelines as I recall from when I saw it announced are that you have to use Lyft Line/Uber Pool and vehicle has to have at least 6 seats, and both Uber and Lyft have tweaked their apps to ensure that they recognize benefit-debit cards and only let you use them on rides that meet IRS guidelines for commute benefits.
It seems the details are here: https://help.lyft.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002073608--Line-C...
That makes me wonder, although the problem is solved from the technological & regulatory sides, how many of those types of vehicles are there. I guess that's why this option is only available in four cities.
California's Parking Cashout law requires your employer to reimburse you what they would spend on your parking if you don't use it. This applies in the (somewhat narrow) situation where you not parking has a direct impact on what the company spends - i.e. they rent a spot in a garage.
When I worked in Santa Monica it was a couple hundred bucks a month - cycling was nicer anyway, too.
Didn't we just have that discussion on the compression thread?
(c.f. the vampire in the car, the tongue on the guy reading the book).
An example, it is absurd to me (and most urbanist types) that Manhattan still has free street parking and that all the East River bridges are free. Congestion pricing in Lower Manhattan was on the table during the Bloomberg era, but never made it through. It should have.
Anyway, my impression is that opposition to things like congestion fees come more from affluent commuting suburbanites than the poor (who probably already rely on transit anyway).
If there's broad demand for increased capacity, why not just raise everybody's taxes to pay for it, and let everybody use it?
NYC sort-of does this by not using zone fares, so long trips from far-away areas (read: poor parts of the city) cost as much as a brief trip through a rich area.
Instead they said, "Hey, we were giving the average employee $100/mo in parking. We're gonna keep doing that in the form of cash. But, to fund that extra 100 you're now getting in cash, anyone who wants to use the lot has to pay its market value." In short, instead of providing a "flakey parking availability" they provided cash. It's a lot (a lot... get it?) like selling the lot and giving the proceeds to employees.
This isn't always the best idea (sometimes, similar schemes can be socially unjust), but from an efficiency standpoint, it's hard to beat.
I hear what you're saying about pissing people off, but this should do the opposite. Sure, some folks might irrationally like jockeying for position or be early risers. But the company never intended to say "this benefit is for early risers". The intended it as a benefit to all employees and now it is.
As they increased their employee count, the time cost would have increased as well and employees unwilling to spend that time on trying to get parking would take another mode of transportation. From the linked comic it sounds like the employees that spearheaded the program were trying to prove a larger point that cities could raise public transit funds by charging for all parking spaces in a city. I don't think this program was at all about making things more efficient at Lyft.
It's not clear that the companies they shopped the idea around to had a shortage of parking.
Queuing costs are costs that the employees who are trying to park are imposing on themselves. A parking fee is a cost that is being imposed on the employees by the employer. It's reasonable for employees to react differently to those costs.
If you're building a widely profitable business (like facebook), the better answer is to just build a larger parking lot. Just like lyft eventually did, and abandoned this bad idea.
Facebook has the advantage of building in the burbs where there's already a glut of parking and people expect more.
If you choose to view that as a masochistic world view, that is entirely your choice. However, i would hate to live near you.
Publicly auction public parking spots and allow them to rise unboundedly in price.
These are all economically efficient approaches. Instead of shaming people, we should incentivise non-wasteful behaviour (and I think economic efficiency is a good guideline here).
(My current company has "free" bicycle parking in the basement with a years-long waiting list; meanwhile many of the spots are unused or have a bike sitting their permanently, and I'm paying for a spot 10 minutes' walk away. Maybe I should start asking them to charge)
Driving is a pretty minimally wasteful behavior compared to the low lot coverage and building heights prevalent here.
(I say this as a carfree renter in an urban high-rise. This is fun, but in no way sustainable - I have no hope of owning an analogous condo, let alone one big enough for a family, and that's as a well-compensated professional. When it comes time for stability and child-raising, it will be imperative to chose a city with enough parking that I can commute from an outer suburb where prices are accessible to mere upper-income salary workers. Far as I can tell, cities with your view of land use only work for longtime incumbents, international oligarchs, and twentysomethings living together like they're still in college).
Have you considered that one of reasons for the high condo prices may be that there's too few of them, in part because land that could be used to build a bunch more is taken up by parking lots?
Especially if we're talking about flat parking (not silos), a single spot is taking the place of multiple condos. So you can imagine how much each actually costs, even if you're not the one paying the price.
Absolutely, yes! I'm just not holding my breath for public opinion to turn around on whether condo towers and the developers who build them are good or evil.
>in part because land that could be used to build a bunch more
In minuscule part. Mostly, land is taken up by buildings that are too short.
>a single spot is taking the place of multiple condos
This presumes a building height that I assure you would get laughed out of the Zoning Adjustments Board hearing room.
Each parking space enables timely access to much more square feet of land than any residential construction project would contemplate. (Up to the point where the road network breaks down due to congestion, which is why I think affordability in those cities is probably a lost cause).
> yet they somehow manage to have a middle class.
Probably because their electorates are able to distinguish between mid-rise apartment blocks and Satan, just like they distinguish between single-payer healthcare and the USSR.
The same is true for parking. A replacement transportation system would be better, but that doesn't excuse moving us towards a world with no transportation system.
Loss aversion is a real thing. People _hate_ losing a thing they have. So if you make parking a reservation system and then give a $300 credit to all employees who don't make a reservation you'll get much less blow-back than if you raise everyone's pay by $300, and then charge $300 to reserve parking.
I think saying it's "just" a psychological difference really undervalues that aspect. After all, the goal is to create market efficiencies _without_ upsetting people. Solving the psychological problem is really the key to keeping people happy with the new system.
Also, a bit off topic, but biking is not a panacea for everyone. I tried cycling my 18 mile commute along the PCH for 1.5 years. By the end of it, I was really turned off by biking. I like to play basketball, hike, and go open ocean swimming. I finally quit cycling to work because I had dead legs due to musclr fatigue and couldn't enjoynmy preferred recreational activities.
Also, I sweat very easily. Luckily my office at the time had a shower.
I can totally understand Lyft not offering in-app credits, for a number of reasons:
1: If a Lyft employee is unable to get a Lyft, for whatever reason (like, no drivers nearby, or whatever), then they're gonna be pissed, because they won't be able to use their Lyft credit for an alternate option (where another person could also check other options, like Uber, taxi, calling a friend, etc.).
2: Lyft would probably still have to deduct payroll taxes on the credit paid to the employee. That would really suck for Lyft employees who don't use Lyft enough to use up the credit (by, for example, taking public transit). See https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
I'm surprised that/if they didn't have that perk before the parking brouhaha, but even if they didn't, non-parkers got $150/mo just for not parking there, so they could certainly spend that on Lyft rides.
Though considering that a month is around 23 working days, that means they only have a little over $3 per ride, which won't get them to and from work every day in the month... unless they take Line and live within walking distance anyway...
Seems like the standard formula for a business news article now is to repackage common sense ideas as something new and exciting.
Charged for parking? Let's make a comic about how innovative that was.
I'd personally prefer random distribution over selling to the highest bidder. Does every single thing really have to be for sale?
Maybe not over just parking but because it's really inconvenient/expensive to go into the office--and you need to do so on a daily basis--absolutely. Which not being able to easily park at any time can be a component of.
If there are only a handful spots left, the price would be really high. If a parking lot is not that popular it will automatically be cheaper. Environmentally friendly cars could get a discount.
Instead of reserved parking spots, the spot would know for instance if it's never used during working hours and the prices would adjust to optimize the fill rate of all spots. Residents would get a discount for spots close to home.
I guess most cities have zones with different fees, and often free parking on weekends and nights. This would instead adjust it automatically, maybe even adjust for popularity of a particular group of spots.
The main problem with such initiatives is that most drivers reflexively despise them, and will create a big political stink.
Most FinDi commuters have to pay for their spots. It's widely used and well known stick to get people to carpool or take alternative means to work.
You might as well "investigate" whether free work shuttles are actually free.
The cost for the app? Parking space owners have to let me use their space for one workday a year, with a prearranged date of my choice. If everybody signed up, I would have a space almost every day, free of charge.
IMHO, they'd be better off shutting down the lot and using it as a picnic area / common area for everyone to enjoy.
We are affected by the "General Use Permit" (https://gup.stanford.edu/the-project/reference-documents) which, among other things, limits the number of parking spaces that campus can have.
As a result, Stanford has a number of programs to encourage people to commute:
• Paying for a Caltrain Go Pass (https://transportation.stanford.edu/transit/free-transit-inc...) and VTA Eco Pass (https://transportation.stanford.edu/transit/free-transit-and...).
• Running the AE-F (https://transportation.stanford.edu/marguerite/aef) and EB (https://transportation.stanford.edu/marguerite/eb) lines to the East Bay.
• Coordinating AC Transit for the two Dumbarton Express lines (https://dumbartonexpress.com), and the U line (https://transportation.stanford.edu/transit/free-transit-inc...) lines.
• Various car- and van-pooling options (https://transportation.stanford.edu/rideshare).
And there's also the various Marguerite lines (X Express & Limited, Y Express and Limited, and S) that supplement normal service. There're also other things that I've forgotten about.
All of those options are pretty well used, and it shows that for the main use cases, it is possible to "charge for free parking", but I think the important thing is that you do have to have some external constraint.
In Lyft's case, it was a lack of spaces. In Stanford's case, it's a negotiated restriction. Either way, that avoids the "Facebook alternative", where you don't have any outside reason you can point to.
The best example of this is the Stanford Research Park: If you're a Stanford employee who works off-campus (and the Stanford Research Park counts as off-campus), then you don't qualify for the $300 yearly credit, even if you use bus/train/vanpool all the time (see https://transportation.stanford.edu/commute-club/about-commu...).
So I guess the lesson (or at least the correlation) is, you need some external restriction, or else "most" people will drive!
If they allowed everyone to choose to work from home, or from another location, then it would have something interesting to say about it.
But the demand is artificial in that context, forcing people to exist at that office, and yet not allowing them the means to do so with their mode of travel of choice by not providing sufficient parking.
They also don't provide a runway and hangar space, nor a marina, and probably not a SpaceX landing pad either! People can't commute with their mode of travel of choice!
Jokes aside, even ignoring the broader impacts of more driving and just focusing within the company itself, providing limited free parking is "stealing" from those who don't drive (the company is spending resources/opportunity cost on something they don't use), and even on those who have to drive on certain days (they're pushed to getting to work at ridiculous hours to be able to park). With offices where it is actually feasible to commute by public transport (like Lyft's office which seemed to be ~0.5 mile from the nearest BART station and less from many bus routes) and when working at a transportation company, there are alternatives to driving one's own car, so putting a price on parking encourages people to treat it as the scarce resource it is.
This doesn't seem right - it assumes that the resources going toward parking would be otherwise spent on employees. If money was taken from employees as a payroll deduction, then "stealing" might apply, but until the money is promised to employees, its not employee money, it belongs to the company. There is no theft that I can see.
"Demand is a fallacy"
Probably the dumbest thing I've ever read. Do you think there is no demand for food? Is demand for food a fallacy?
Jesus.
And that's exactly what I do - I almost never go anywhere that makes you pay for parking. Downtown, or to visit congested cities for example. Or to small stores on roads with parking meters.
Are those places happier without me? Maybe. Depends on if they value whatever economic activity I would produce over their poor traffic management.
Would I use public transportation? After trying it for a while in a city that is widely considered among the top 5 in the world for public transport my answer is a resounding: NO!
Public transport is horrible, even when it is the best humans are able to make it. I feel bad for those people who have no other choice, and I am determined to never live in a city that requires it.
Probably. I would guess that paying for parking is a rather good way to filter for people that are there to spend money.
Which city, out of curiosity? The cities widely considered to be among the top 5 are pretty universally a pain to get around in a car. Asia and Europe aren't exactly car friendly.