The facebook character had the right answer. These companies have products that create more value than running a paid parking lot... why would you trade an employee on a product like that for a few dollars in parking fees.
The point of the article is that by making something scarce free, the company was in effect "rationing by the queue", an inefficient way to handle things. Those unwilling to get there early had a bad time.
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.
The parking spots were not "free", employees were paying for them with their time, leaving their homes extra early and risking circling the neighborhood looking for extra spots if the lot was full. That time was worth money to the drivers and the growing price of a spot was evidence of that.
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 was also about making things more efficient at Lyft. Some people really needed cars (mostly because they had kids) but couldn't find spots unless they arrived super early. This change pushed some people to stop using their cars.
yes, I read the cartoon. There's nothing new in it -- these are all well known things (like 100 year old things).
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.
Certainly under the prevailing moralistic view on HN that life is too comfortable and people ought to suffer more & have less free time, there is too much parking.
Well, that just argues for a Land Value Tax. If you buy land in downtown SF and want to make that a parking lot, more power to you, but you pay taxes proportional to the unimproved value of the land, and so you pay a lot more with respect to the value you gain than if you were to use it for office space.
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).
Land value tax is the ideal end state, but it's difficult for one person to work towards that; doing it on a smaller scale by e.g. getting your own employer to introduce a scheme like this seems a lot more plausible. (Also things like letters to one's representative asking them to remove parking minimums from planning criteria)
(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)
Who came up with such a dumb scheme. Bikes consume almost no space. The idea that there is a "spot" for one just seems needless. My buildings bicycle parking is a storage closet with 4 racks. Last time I checked there were a dozen bikes, a few scooters, and skateboards in there.
If you presuppose that Prop 13 could be eliminated, then you probably wouldn't need a land value tax or any parking because all those single family homes would be sold and developed into higher-density uses.
Driving is a pretty minimally wasteful behavior compared to the low lot coverage and building heights prevalent here.
We have a middle class in this country because it's reasonable to participate in productive economic activity while living in housing whose price doesn't completely swallow your productivity. Parking is what makes that possible. It's a fucking great use of land.
(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).
Other countries have much less parking, yet they somehow manage to have a middle class.
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.
There are other countries without the need for a private health insurance market. Yet no one thinks shutting down the health insurance market would be good policy unless combined with a replacement like single-payer.
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.
Easy solution. The company could give every employee a $300 raise and the charge $300 for parking. Those who want to keep the spot stay the same. Those who don't, gain $300.
That difference is just a psychological one. The end result is still people with a parking spot have $300 less than people without a parking spot. It doesn't matter which side you call the baseline.
Yes, but psychologically it _does_ matter which side you call the baseline.
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.
The psychological difference is that people react differently depending on whether the fee is seen as "not receiving a bonus that other people got", or "taking a pay cut when others didn't." If that doesn't make sense to you, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of "The Paradox of Choice," a book that lays out neatly how the human brain can be manipulated by simple restatements like this.
One kink is that the raise would only be ~$180 after tax at typical Lyft employee tax rates and they wouldn't be able to deduct commuting expenses (unless they were over a certain level).
