[johnhess]

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.

[revicon]

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.

[surfmike]

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.

[rgbrenner]

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.

[throwaway91111]

There's already too much damn parking. Stop driving to work. Live too far away? Convince your company to move to a place with sane housing costs.

Facebook has the advantage of building in the burbs where there's already a glut of parking and people expect more.

[closeparen]

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.

[throwaway91111]

No, parking is a terrible use of land and encourages bad practices like commuting in a personal vehicle using 1/5th of available seating.

If you choose to view that as a masochistic world view, that is entirely your choice. However, i would hate to live near you.

[arjie]

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).

[lmm]

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)

[closeparen]

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.

[closeparen]

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).

[icebraining]

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.

[yardie]

There are other countries with similar or higher productivity. The need for a car and car parking is not a requirement for a strong middle class