Getting commuters out of their cars: Where's the payoff?

By Eric Pryne
Seattle Times staff reporter

ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES The soft economy may make some companies less inclined to charge their employees for parking.

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Then, in 2000, the Northgate-area hospital added a stick. It began charging day-shift solo drivers $30 a month to park on campus.

Drive-alone commuting dropped 13 percent.

To avoid the new fee, security officer Fausto Espinoza started car pooling to work. "Thirty dollars, that's half of the gas bill or half of the electric bill at home," he says.

Larger employers such as Northwest Hospital have been waging war against the "single-occupant vehicle" for more than a decade. It's the law: The state Commute Reduction Act of 1991 requires employers of more than 100 day-shift workers to establish programs to get commuters out of their cars.

To help persuade them, government transit planners have worked with companies to develop all sorts of promotions and subsidies.

Nothing works better than the stick, the planners agree. Putting a price on parking gets results because it embraces a fundamental economic principle: When something costs more, people tend to do it less.

But the most effective tool also is the least popular. In King County, according to the state Department of Transportation's Commute Trip Reduction Office, employees pay to park at fewer than one-third of all work sites covered by the law.

Their number may even have declined recently, in part because of the region's soft economy.

Most employers who do charge are in central Seattle, the University District or downtown Bellevue. Farther out in suburbia, where most of the region's job growth of the past few decades has come, free parking remains the norm.

Suburban employers are reluctant to charge because they fear it could damage employee recruitment, retention and morale, says David Stallings, a King County Metro market-development planner. "Free parking is something they feel they need to provide to remain competitive," he says.

	ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES There's no such thing as free parking, transportation analysts point out. Building it can cost anywhere from $1,500 per stall for a suburban surface lot to $22,000 per stall for a downtown underground garage, according to the Victoria Transport Policy.

Many offer a carrot but no stick. If Costco started charging workers to park at its Issaquah headquarters, "I think we'd get a negative reaction from our employees, and I think I would understand why," says CEO Jim Sinegal.

No one wants to pay for something that's always been free. "All of us hate paying for parking," confesses Shawn Rossiter, a car pooler who oversees Northwest Hospital's parking program and supports its goals. "We'd all rather have that $30 a month to buy a pizza."

The hospital started charging because pressures from the marketplace and government trumped employee objections. Over time, some experts predict, those forces will persuade many more employers to follow Northwest's lead.

Someone always pays

"Parking is not free — even if it's free," says Mark Hallenbeck, director of the Washington State Transportation Center at the University of Washington.

Building it can cost anywhere from $1,500 per stall for a suburban surface lot to $22,000 per stall for a downtown underground garage, according to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute — and that doesn't include land costs. Annual operating and maintenance expenses can run an additional $100 to $400 per stall.

Who pays for "free" parking? Indirectly, everyone does, says Donald Shoup, a UCLA urban-planning professor who has studied parking for a quarter-century.

Companies recoup their parking costs by charging customers higher prices and paying workers lower wages, he says: "Only in our role as motorists do we not pay for parking."

But those costs are hidden. For most motorists, free parking — or the perception of it — provides a powerful incentive to drive.

Downtown Seattle has the region's best transit service and highest parking costs. Even so, a 2001 King County Metro survey found 44 percent of downtown workers commuted solo.

Three-quarters of them enjoyed free or reduced-price parking at work.

Charging for parking can be a powerful incentive to find an alternative. In downtown Bellevue, 73 percent of the employees of firms that provide free parking drive alone to work, according to the state Commute Trip Reduction Office.

For firms that don't offer free parking, that figure is just 47 percent.

Some employers have achieved dramatic reductions in solo commuting by coupling changes in parking policy with improved incentives to stop driving. The engineering firm CH2M Hill eliminated free parking and began subsidizing transit when it moved to a downtown Bellevue office tower in the late 1980s.

The share of workers driving solo declined from 89 percent to 65 percent in 1990. Today it's just 38 percent.

The University of Washington began jacking up parking prices in the early 1990s, using the proceeds to subsidize transit, car pools and other options. The number of students, faculty and staff who drive alone to campus has slid from one-third to less than one-quarter.

Without the program, the university estimates, it would have had to spend up to $100 million for more parking.

But employers such as the UW and CH2M Hill remain the exceptions. Planners say the number of employers who charge for parking hasn't increased in recent years.

With office vacancy rates high, some building managers are dropping or reducing parking charges to lure or keep tenants. King County Metro says the share of downtown Seattle workers who enjoyed free parking at work actually increased between 2001 and 2003. Some suburban employers who once charged for parking have stopped.

In much of the region, though, pay parking was a tough sell even before the economy soured.

Abundant asphalt

About 80,000 people work in Redmond, more than twice as many as in 1990. Nearly two-thirds of them are employed by companies that belong to the Greater Redmond Transportation Management Association, an organization that works with employers to get commuters out of their cars.

Some of those firms have award-winning commute-trip-reduction programs. Not one charges employees for parking.

If they did, drive-alone commuting almost certainly would drop, says John Resha, the association's executive director. But, "to be first, you've got to have a real good reason," he adds. "In the suburban market, you're in a whole different situation."

People work farther apart in suburbia, usually in widely separated, low-rise buildings. That means transit service often is spotty and finding a car-pool partner more challenging. Employers are more reluctant to take away free parking and risk employees' wrath if alternatives to driving don't work well, says the UW's Hallenbeck.

What's more, he adds, many suburban workers could simply park on the street.

To prevent spillover into neighborhoods, many cities and counties required developers to provide more parking stalls than employees and customers needed under ordinary circumstances. So on-site parking is usually abundant.

For many suburban employees, free parking is a benefit "not unlike a health or retirement plan," the state Commute Trip Reduction Office said in a 1999 report.

Employers tinker with it at their own risk.

After the Commute Trip Reduction law passed in 1991, Olin Aerospace of Redmond — now Aerojet — formed an in-house committee to figure out how to comply.

Its options were few. Management told committee members they couldn't propose anything to get commuters out of their cars that would cost the company money or alter the workweek. So, on the committee's recommendation, Olin imposed a $5 monthly parking charge in 1994. Within a year, drive-alone commuting had dropped from 90 percent of the work force to 67 percent, according to a 1995 King County Metro report.

Within another year, the fee was gone.

Cindi Gyselinck, Olin's employee-transportation coordinator at the time, says many workers were so upset by the parking charge that they refused to fill out the paperwork to deduct the $5 from their paychecks.

"You're not going to fire somebody over five dollars," Gyselinck says. Olin repealed the charge and reimbursed its employees.

Many workers reverted to driving alone.

Supply and demand

Northwest Hospital's North Seattle campus is more suburban than inner-city. It's no transit hub: Just one bus route serves the campus. Before 2000, parking had been free for 40 years.

The city provided the hospital with a push to start charging. It required Northwest to switch to pay parking before it could build a new garage.

But Rossiter, the program supervisor, says the decision to end free parking was mostly a question of supply and demand.

When parking was free, patients and visitors often had trouble finding a space. "We had sick people driving around and around, looking for a place to park," Rossiter says. "It was a nightmare."

Charging was a way to manage demand. Everyone but employees who car pool pays now: visitors and patients by the hour, workers by the month.

The $30 monthly fee wasn't greeted warmly. "It got to the point where it was almost tears," says Rossiter. "People asked us, 'Why am I paying for the same piece of asphalt where I've been parking free forever?' "

Many workers still avoid the charge by parking on neighborhood streets. That should become less convenient in a couple of years, when the city plans to limit on-street parking to two hours.

The parking fee is no more popular now than it was in 2000, Rossiter says. But Fausto Espinoza, the car-pooling security officer, says he has come to accept it. His commute from Everett takes less time in the HOV lane, he says. He wouldn't go back to driving alone even if the charge was repealed.

The same market and regulatory forces that pushed Northwest Hospital toward pay parking are starting to play out elsewhere in the region and the nation.

By 2020, according to one leading economic forecaster, King, Snohomish and Pierce counties will have to find room for 470,000 more jobs, 30 percent more than today. If the state Growth Management Act holds, that growth will be up, not out. The law directs development into already-urbanized areas to prevent sprawl.

That means available land will get more expensive. Using it to build pricey parking lots or garages for everyone who wants to drive — but not pay — will become more difficult to justify, says Resha, the Redmond commute-trip-reduction official.

If free parking somehow is provided for everyone, traffic will just get worse, says Rick Williams, a Portland transportation consultant and former parking-company executive.

That, in turn, will discourage new business, he contends — another reason for employers to stop subsidizing parking and start subsidizing alternatives.

Some Puget Sound cities already have adopted limits on how much parking developers can provide. One reason: environmental concerns about the impact of runoff from impervious surfaces on streams and salmon.

At some point, Resha says, even in suburbia, demand for parking will exceed supply. "That's when you let the market start to determine the value of it," he says.

In five or 10 years, Resha predicts, even in Redmond, people will be paying to park.

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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