$2 Daily Workplace Parking Charge + $4 Cashout

23% Less U.S. Commute VMT/CO2 (51.7M tons CO2/year)

First Version: 10/15/06, major revision June 2008, latest update: 8/8/08

Status:

• A draft-version academic paper was submitted to the Transportation Research Board TDM Committee: http://www.cities21.org/TRB_Paid_Parking.pdf . 

  • Abstract: Past efforts to convert free workplace parking to charged or cashout have not flourished. This new scheme begins with $0.25/day charge and $1/day cashout. Charges/cashout increase over time to $2/$4 as other companies adopt the scheme, addressing the previous recruiting/retention objection. Trust-based, self-reporting enables very low-cost implementation, addressing the previous cost objection. The scheme is marketed to workers as a climate-protecting measure. Potential U.S. commute VMT savings is 23%, reducing 51.7M tons CO2/year. Compared to past efforts, this scheme uses a) collective, phased action to overcome the Tragedy of the Commons, b) simultaneous charge and cashout, c) trust-based reporting, and d) monetization of saved parking spaces. A company that voluntarily implements this scheme risks productivity-reducing internal employee strife between climate protectors and climate skeptics. To address this objection, a “good cop, bad cop” strategy is proposed. A state implements a more draconian policy, but allows companies flexibility to implement this scheme. This policy research is informed by behavioral psychologists, listserv sounding boards including transp-tdm, and advocacy to nine large Silicon Valley employers. A web-based employee survey was developed to understand qualitative issues associated with the scheme. The survey presented the scheme as a policy debate, with pros and cons, asking respondents for short essay responses. The 55 responses: a) identified special cases in need of clarification and b) provided colorful and useful comments from the extreme ends of the response spectrum.

• The proposal was submitted for consideration to a climate-aware California politician. 
• This proposal is at various stages with nine prominent, high-tech Bay Area companies.  Our contacts at these companies come from three different areas: trip reduction staff, facilities management staff, and "green team" members.
• Initial survey results: http://www.cities21.org/paidParkingSrvyResults.htm
• In regards to an employer voluntarily adopting this scheme, creating internal diviseness between employers who are climate protectors versus climate skeptics.  On Aug 8,  SF Chronicle reports that tech-savvy voters prefer Obama 5-1 over McCain. This provides a sense that a tech workers are a bit more pro-climate than the general US population. A substantial minority of these pro-climate workers will still be neutral or mildly opposed to the charges + cashout scheme, as a) the desire for climate protection is not a deep inclination, and b) knowledge of the land use => climate link is not well-understood.  However, pro-climate, anti-scheme employees are not expected to cause internal strife.  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/08/BUKR127DOS.DTL

   

Scheme Summary:

CO2 from driving will continue to grow in the U.S., even as average mpg slowly rises (assuming a CAFE increase, a cleaner fuel mix, and continued high gas prices). The reason is that "vehicle miles traveled" (VMT) will increase faster than fuel economy increases. 50% of CA CO2 comes from transportation, so we have to cut VMT. Parking charges reduce VMT more than all other policy measures combined. The CA Climate Action Team would love to reduce VMT, but they can only pursue incremental regulations and voluntary action. Without collective action by corporations to reduce commuting, we won't hit 2020 CO2 targets.  

Past efforts to convert free office parking to paid parking (or to apply parking cashout) in the U.S. have not flourished. Past efforts have not spread widely to create a significant shift away from single occupancy vehicle (SOV) commuting. This proposal differs from past efforts:

• Start with $0.25 per day employee parking charges and $1.00 per day employee cashout.  A cashout is where the employer pays employees not to park at the office.   
• Employees are assured that all parking charge revenue goes to fund cashout.
• Charges and cashout increase gradually over time (to $2.00 and $4.00 per day) as other companies adopt the same program, ensuring that no Human Resources (HR) recruiting/retention disadvantage is created. (If Company A and Company B are competitors, and if A charges $2 for parking and B has free parking, then B has a "$2 per day" recruiting advantage over A.  Hence, both A and B have to participate for the proposal to work.) 
• Implement monthly employee reporting via a trust-based, self-reporting HR web applet (one Bay Area company uses this approach).  Incorporate other employer commute benefits into this monthly reporting (Commuter Check - pre-tax transit passes, private WiFi express bus service, etc) to ensure that “double benefits” are not provided to employees. Self-reporting makes implementation very low-cost for employers. The company reports that 20% of employees are under-collecting the cashout, validating that company's trust in its employees.     
• Position “cashout + parking charges” as part of a comprehensive employer commute reduction program.  Educate employees about the unique behavior-changing/demand-reducing properties of parking charges (23% commute mode shift is expected).  Besides reducing CO2, this scheme will: a) ease severe parking shortages at some office campuses, b) create real-estate in-fill opportunities (by permanently reducing cars parked at offices, this scheme enables smart new in-fill on land that was considered to be "built out"), and c) motivate cities to reduce parking maximums for new office development.  
• Parking spaces take up valuable land.  Employers have to pay for parking space land used by drivers.  Employers save money when workers commute via green alternatives (transit, car/van pool, bike, walk, and telecommute) that do not require land for cars.  Hence, Bay Area employers provide a hidden $7.59 daily subsidy to SOV commuters (subsidy calculation).  This cashout + charges scheme reduces land consumption, increasing the economic efficiency of employers.  Further, the current policy of subsidizing SOV commuting harms the environment.   
• Cities are hard-pressed to meet climate protection and traffic reduction objectives.  Because the cashout + charges scheme is so very effective compared to other policies, cities should reward employers that provide leadership on this scheme.  "Charging for parking is the single most effective strategy to encourage people to use alternatives to the SOV" - Jeff Tumlin, Nelson Nygaard Associates.   
• Many companies and cities can cooperate to spread cashout + charges nationwide, reducing 51.7M tons CO2 per year.  No credible plan exists to achieve Kyoto 2020 or California AB32 2020 CO2 reduction targets without large demand reduction such as cashout + charges.  

Compared to past schemes, this proposal relies on four innovations:

• Collective, phased action to overcome the Tragedy of the Commons

• Simultaneous charges and cashout, with parking charge transfer payment from SOV commuters to greener commuters

• Trust-based monthly self-reporting

• Cities enable real-estate benefit for virtuous employers.  

Careful effort has been taken to make this scheme palatable to employers. Past objections have been addressed. By adding in real-estate benefits, we believe that the financial outcome for employers will be either positive or neutral. We believe that the majority of employees will favor this scheme and we will take steps to validate this belief to employers.     

We have spoken to MTC (Bay Area's Metropolitan Planning Organization) staffers who are a) in favor of office parking charges, and b) talk about this policy as being very hard to achieve, but being the "holy grail of VMT reduction." California State Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Linda Adams has shown significant interest in commute alternatives as a way to help meet California Climate Protection Law (AB32) carbon reduction objectives. She is enthusiastic about pricing opportunities / trip reduction.

Parking Cashout Versus Parking Charges

A "parking cashout" is where an employer pays employees not to park at the work place.  One Bay Area employer (who we will call "Employer X") has a severe parking shortage, so pays employees $4 per day to not park.  Cashout is a "carrot," a benefit used to motivate commuting behavior change.  Employer X's $4 per day cashout program has reduced SOV commute mode share from 78% to 74%.  Before cashout, Employer X had 22% green commutes (walk, bus, train, telecommute, carpool, etc).  To implement cashout, Employer had to pay the existing 22% green commuters $4 per day (out of fairness) before motivating 4% new green commuters.  Hence, the cost per day per new green commute at Employer X is $26 per day (for math, see "Employer X Cashout Calculation" at the bottom of this paper).  Unfortunately, this is a very ineffective way to reduce SOV commuting.  (For the same budget as cashout, Employer X could fund lease payments so that each employee could use two hybrid cars.) Some historical, discontinued cashout programs (from 1995 and before, not in Bay Area) were more effective, but cashout has rarely been tried in modern, auto-centric, suburban office settings. The recent findings of Employer X are not encouraging for Bay Area suburban office cashout.  For more details on cashout, see: http://www.nctr.usf.edu/clearinghouse/parking.htm  

"Parking charges" are where employees have to pay to park at the work place.  Charges are a "stick," not a carrot, changing behavior by penalizing SOV commuting.  High parking charges (combined with good transit and bad auto traffic) in downtown San Francisco dramatically reduce SOV commuting.  SOV commute mode share is less than 50% in San Francisco, but SOV commute mode share at the Bay Area's 17 large suburban-style office parks (more than 594,000 employees) with free parking is greater than 80%. 

"Irritant theory" of behavior change

There is an intuitive psychological theory as to why cashout is not very effective.  High-paid office workers ignore small-benefit programs such as $4 per day cashout.  This carrot is not a sufficiently large motivator to cause commuting behavior to change.  Employees will not think about the cashout on a regular basis.  We believe that parking charges will "irritate" SOV commuters.  These SOV commuters will think about the parking charges every day they commute. Eventually this irritant gnaws at them long enough to cause many to change behavior.  Changing commuting mode choice is a significant decision because of relatively high barriers to changing away from the convenience of driving alone.  This difficult decision is not a "snap decision" and may require pondering over many weeks.   The same $ value of irritant/stick has a much higher impact than the same $ value of cashout/carrot.    The intuitive theory is well substantiated from both field results and from "behavioral economics" research:

• A 1989 academic paper ("Parking Subsidies and Commuter Mode Choice: Assessing the Evidence," by Richard Willson, Donald Shoup, and Martin Wachs) finds commute carrots are less effective than sticks: "A program of transit and vanpool subsidies as well as preferential parking for carpoolers had little effect until [Twentieth Century Corporation in Los Angeles] raised the price of employee parking from no charge to $30 per month for solo drivers. Solo driving decreased from 90 to 65 percent after pricing."

• A 1990 academic paper ("Proceedings--Commuter Parking Symposium" by Metro and Association for Commuter Transportation, Seattle, Washington) found that charges changed behavior where incentives had not: "CH2M Hill in Bellevue, Washington began charging solo drivers $40 per month for parking, the amount the company pays the building owner for parking. All employees receive a $40 per month travel allowance in their paychecks. Carpoolers park for free. Walkers, cyclists and drop offs keep the travel allowance. Solo driving declined from 89 percent to 64 percent after the parking policies were put into place."

• Janis Hom, consumer product marketing expert: "The idea of rewards motivating behavior change is really only a good theory. When a sufficient pain threshold is reached, then people change. Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth analogy of the frog being brought to a slow boil is a colorful analogy. At a moderate heat/pain level, you can slow-cook a frog (I use chicken stock with cilantro and cayenne). If you turn the heat up high, the frog jumps out of the pot (a behavior change). $4/day is clearly not a sufficient reward to significantly change tech worker commute patterns."

• From the field of behavioral economics, there is quite a bit of evidence that potential losses are more motivating than potential gains. In his book, "The Paradox of  Choice," Barry Schwartz has a discussion of this "loss aversion" phenomenon. Schwartz cites research by Kahneman and Tversky demonstrating that, "Losing $100 produces a feeling of negativity that is more intense than the feelings of elation produced by a gain" (of $100).  See Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science 185, 1124 - 1131.  Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1984). Choices, Values and Frames. American Psychologist, 39, 341 - 350.  Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (eds). (2000). Choices, Values and Frames.  New York: Cambridge University Press.

• In the book Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing by Doug McKenzie-Mohr, page 90 provides a discussion of positive (gain) and negative (loss) framing: Behavior change "messages which emphasize losses which occur as a result of inaction are consistently more persuasive than messages that emphasize savings as a result of taking action."  [McKenzie-Mohr references J. J. Davis, "The effects of message framing on response to environmental communications," Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 1995, #72, pgs 285-299.]

• A layman's guide to economic theory (Logic of Life by Tim Harford) states that we hate losing a dollar more than we like finding one.
   

Our $4/day cashout combined with $2/day charges has not only a $2/day irritant that will continue to gnaw at SOV commuters over time, but the dollar benefit for green comuuting versus SOV commuting is $6 per day ($1,380 per year), a significant level of financial motivation that SOV commuters will think about (rather than ignoring) during this gnawing process.  The 1990 Ch2M Hill example given above achieved 25% mode shift via this combined carrot/stick approach, with a daily parking charge rate that was close to $2 per work day. 

A price difference for green commutes versus SOV commutes of $6 has the equivalent motivation of $10/gallon gas.  [Calculation: Gas costs $4 per gallon.  Average Bay Area daily, two-way commute is 32 miles.  Assuming cars get 32 mpg, one gallon of gas is used per two-way commute. Hence the perceived cost of a one-gallon  SOV commute is: 1 gallon of gas for $4 +  $6 price difference = $10.]   

Will SOV commuters be willing to pay others to be green and to not drive?

The cashout + charges program transfers money from SOV commuters to green commuters.  Will SOV commuter employees be willing to pay their co-workers to be green?  Here is evidence of some "willingness to pay for others to be green and/or to reduce congestion:"

• Silicon Valley residents passed the Measure A half-cent sales tax to fund new transit projects, generally these projects are funded "so that others can take transit." Per capita Measure A sales tax is about $25 per year or $2 per month. 
• Bay Area residents seem to be comfortable with paying $4 SOV bridge tolls while carpools pay nothing at those same bridge entrances. 
• Some people are willing to purchase carbon offsets to counter their carbon production, funding projects that reduce carbon.  These carbon-offsetting people may not change their own personal behavior. See: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/03/survey_of_carbo.php 
• In "Drivers’ willingness-to-pay to reduce travel time: evidence from the San Diego I-15 congestion pricing project" (by David Brownstone, Arindam Ghosh, Thomas Golob, Camilla Kazimi, and Dirk Van Amelsfort, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Volume 37, Issue 4, May 2003, Pages 373-387) the authors "estimate that willingness to pay to reduce congested travel time is higher than previous stated preference results. Our estimate of median willingness to pay to reduce commute time is roughly $30 per hour."  A cashout + charges 23% commute reduction would presumably reduce peak hour travel time. 

Collective Action: Public Policy Innovation Theory

An opportune moment in green behavior change history

• There are many well-known, sound policies to bring about large-scale climate protection, the problem is more in getting these policies implemented.  Because the politics of “big change” are so difficult, we have to be on the lookout for “leveraged” political situations that we can exploit, where there is some “political hunger” that can be molded towards high-impact results.   

• The work of the CA Climate Action team coupled with local city climate protection efforts creates a unique opportunity to bring about innovative climate protection policies.  Should innovative policies be adopted by Bay Area cities, then there is a very good chance such policies will spread nationally and beyond. Many cities are adopting Climate Protection policies and a healthy competition is arising as cities vie to be the greenest and the most innovative.  Thus, there is a political hunger to stand out from other green cities (and to not issue hollow global warming proclamations). 

• Many cities are signing the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection agreement (the Sierra Club has the portal of signatory cities: http://www.coolcities.us/).  Thus, for these cities to be “self-consistent” with their stated green intentions, they will be pressured to match innovations brought about in other competing cities. As of June 2008, there are 124 signatory Cool Cities in California.  The South Bay has a particularly large office market. Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose are already “cool cities.”  More than 500,000 “free surface parking” office workers are represented in the South Bay.     

• Further, tech employers are hungry to be perceived as the greenest.  There are multiple factors behind this.  CEO egos are involved as CEOS compete with executives at other companies over "green."  The NY Times article on Google's regional WiFi commuter bus system (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html ) caused executives at other Bay Area companies to quiz their commute reduction teams about whether there was more that could be done about commutes. Part of the competition comes from the fact that executives from one company serve on the boards of other companies, fostering cross-pollination of green ideas.  Human Resources staff at companies look to company reputation as an advantage in recruiting, and the "most green" designation assists that reputation.   

The Tragedy

• There is free parking at every single surface parking space at U.S. offices (where the following 3 conditions exist: 1) the office has no parking structure, 2) the office is not in a central business district, and 3) the office is in an office zone rather than a university zone.)

• If cashout + charges is cost-effective and high-impact, then why can’t we bring it about?  Because of the Tragedy of the Commons: (The inability to act in the larger collective interest because of individual/local counter-incentives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons).  If all employers and cities act collectively, then all become better off.  But, there is a "first-mover disadvantage."  If a first-mover implements cashout + charges while other employers do not, then the first mover is at a disadvantage. 

  • If one city with 5,000 office surface parking spaces starts charging for parking, then that city becomes uncompetitive with the rest of the local office market (not to mention the national market).  Thus, cities/employers need to “jump in together” to overcome the Tragedy of the Commons.  (The goal will be to have multiple major U.S. office sub-markets jump in by charging a small amount, on the assumption that 75% or more of the office market will still have free parking.  The policy will then spread with a time lag to new markets, and the parking charges will increase over time.) 

• An example of “cities jump in together?”  From an anonymous source: Interesting example in the Twin Cities.  This was always said about changing bars and restaurants to non-smoking.  Every time any city council member proposed it, they were shouted down by people who said, "But people will go somewhere else and all our businesses will lose out."  Then one December day the city of Bloomington (largest suburb) passed a smoking ban.  The following month St Paul did the same, then Minneapolis right after.  It turns out the cities had been in agreement all along about who would go first and who would follow next.  

Nation-wide diffusion strategy

Can we truly get all employers and cities nationwide to jump in simultaneously?  No, but we can start with small cashout + charges and spread the program over time.  Here is one very hypothetical example of spread: 

In this example, 3 companies jump in during January 2009: Companies A, B, and C.  In the graph above, they provide $1 per day cashout.  In the graph below, they are shown also charging $0.25 per day for parking.  Every 6 months, these 3 companies increase their cashout + charges until the maximums of $4 per day cashout and $2 per day charge are reached.  In July 2009, Companies A, B, and C raise cashout to $2 and charges to $0.50.  Also in July 2009, Companies X, Y, and Z jump-in, as well as some companies from the Irvine, CA job center.  This round jumps in with cashout + charges at the initial level.  In January of 2010, more companies jump in: Silicon Valley companies with more than 500 employees and some Washington DC-area employers (Tyson's Corner is a good candidate area).  In July of 2010, CA employers with more than 300 employees jump in.  In January of 2011, US employers with more than 300 employees jump in.  In July of 2011, smaller CA employers jump in. By being first movers, Companies A, B, and C have a slight real-estate disadvantage compared to X, Y, and Z.  However, from a Human Resources employee recruiting standpoint, the balance is not clear.  A, B, and C will obtain the "most green" moniker so will have a recruiting advantage over followers.  Further, we expect A, B, and C to be large companies, primarily concerned about competition with other large companies.  We have structured the spread to concentrate on motivating other large companies to jump in near the outset, to reduce competitive concerns. 

For a nation-wide diffusion strategy, some further thoughts on tactics follow: 

• The first targets should probably be the 200 major suburban US job centers (see Joel Garreau's book, Edge City, for a good starting list of these job centers).  These centers average about 35,000 jobs each.  These job centers typically experience high real-estate prices.  High real-estate prices make the SOV commute subsidy larger for employers.

• One promising strategy to spread cashout + charges would be to pay advocacy groups $1 for each new employee covered by this scheme.  Hence, if an employer with 2,000 employees adopts cashout + charges, the advocacy group would receive $2,000. This would motivate advocates to persuade larger companies first.  There are many suburban job center Transportation Management Associations in the US, these organizations are well-positioned to advocate the scheme to employers as they have already developed relationships with employers.    If the $1 per employee advocacy scheme worked, it would be very cost effective.  Over 20 years, each $1 would produce 13.8 tons CO2 saved

  • If such an advocacy strategy were pursued, a central entity could spearhead a nationwide advocacy effort.  The central entity could develop best practice papers, boilerplate agreements, answer questions, and help lobby employers and cities where necessary.  Some candidate organizations include CUTR (the national Center for Urban Transportation Research that houses Best Workplaces for Commuters and that hosts the transp-tdm list serv), ACT (Association for Commuter Transportation), and ULI (Urban Land Institute).  In the Bay Area, central organizations include SVLG (Silicon Valley Leadership Group), BAC (Bay Area Council), MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission), and VTA (Valley Transit Authority). 

This is a "Grandiose" Scheme (compared to incremental public policy)

By "grandiose," we mean that this scheme is ambitious and elaborate. Some would suggest that a scheme to reduce CO2 by 51.7 tons per year via collective action and individual behavior change is delusional.  However, we'll argue within this section that a grandiose commute reduction scheme is necessary to achieve 2020 climate protection objectives. 

Grandiose schemes provide a stark contrast to U.S. public policymaking at regional and local levels.  In the Bay Area, MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission) is responsible for regional transportation policymaking. Like all U.S. metropolitan planning organizaitons, MTC's Board favors incremental changes such as: "a new bus system here, a new grant program there, a pilot program here, raise the gas tax by $0.05, etc." In 2005, MTC's 2030 long-range Transportation Plan provided an example of the incremental approach.  To accommodate 50% population growth, MTC's incremental policies and programs resulted in projected 40% VMT growth.  Projected 2030 SOV commute mode share declined incrementally from 71% in 2000 to 68.1% in 2030.  The plan represents a sincere effort to make things slightly less worse than if MTC did nothing. MTC did not acknowledge the obvious conclusion that 40% VMT growth will make the already-congested Bay Area far worse off in 2030 than in 2000. 

In “How Can Transport Become More Sustainable?” (3.6MB, pages 54-62, http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/conf/CP37.pdf) Martin Wachs explains how all U.S. public policymaking is unable to bring about large-scale change. “In other (non - U.S.) cases, planning models were used, as they have rarely been in the United States, to 'backcast' rather than to forecast. That is, certain environmental and travel goals were developed for the target year of the plan, and the models were used to test alternative policies and consequently to select policies that would lead to the desired outcomes.” “Despite such urgings and many revisions to planning regulations included in the national highway program, progress in reforming the regional transportation planning process has been limited. We appear to be unable to achieve the dramatic institutional changes that would be needed to make regional planning more capable of addressing sustainability.” Hence, U.S. public policymaking is unable to develop grandiose schemes, but climate protection goals (such as those for California AB32 for 2020 or Kyoto 2020) require grandiose schemes.

Silicon Valley companies are able to think grandiosely.  Hundreds of business plans are created each year for ideas claimed to grow from nothing to a multibillion dollar market in two years.  Companies such as Google and eBay regularly develop strategies to achieve 90% worldwide market share in large markets. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley companies are not responsible for developing grandiose transportation schemes.  Rather, local regulations may force companies to adopt commute trip reduction scheme that, for a large company, might only affect 500 workers.  In contrast, the cashout + charges scheme would change the behavior of 17M workers. 

It is not currently the policy responsibility of companies to cut commuting by 23%, but it is important to inform the private sector than the public sector is unable to achieve this level of cuts.  If the private sector does not take on the responsibility act to cut commuting, then 2020 carbon reduction goals will not be met. 

There are two "camps" within the climate movement.  Camp 1 has determined that significant behavior-change-led demand reductions (such as cashout + charges) are required to meet 2020 targets.  Camp 1 members include {California State Climate Action Team, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Lester Brown, Jared Diamond, Greenbelt Alliance, Bill Fulton, Robert Cervero, Don Weden, Peter Calthorpe, and Silicon Valley Leadership Group}. Camp 2 believes that behavior change is too difficult. Camp 2 members include {Vice President Cheney, James Hansen, Oak Ridge National Labs, Pew Climate Change Center, Amory Lovins, and many Cool Cities}. Within the state of California, demand-reduction (Camp 1) has been adopted as state policy.      

Backing Camp 1, Urban Land Institute's report, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change states, "the projected 48 percent U.S. increase in the total miles driven between 2005 and 2030 will overwhelm expected gains from vehicle efficiency and low-carbon fuels." Please see: http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/gcindex.html  for a two-page summary with a link to a 14-page executive summary. 

To meet AB32 climate goals, California has formed the Land Use Subgroup of the Climate Action Team (LUSCAT).  LUSCAT has a grandiose, ambitious charter, but has little implementation power.  LUSCAT is only allowed to look at projects/policies yielding 1M ton or greater annual CO2 reductions.  LUSCAT's limitation is that it is only able to pursue voluntary programs. Conceivably if LUSCAT could regulate, the state could impose a $6 per parking space per day tax which would reduce commuting by 23% to help easily meet 2020 target.  The cashout + charges scheme follows the LUSCAT philosophy:

• Reduces CA CO2 by 6.3M tons/year, meeting the 1M ton or greater threshold

• Is a voluntary program

• Uses real-estate market forces to help make the program work

• By freeing parking space land for higher use, the scheme enables in-fill.  One of LUSCAT's four main strategies is in-fill

• By creating new in-fill development opportunities, the in-fill could be used to improve jobs/housing balance and to increase density.  Two of the four primary LUSCAT strategies are density and jobs/housing balance. 

Trust-based Employee Monthly Reporting

To implement parking charges, it is often necessary to have "access control" at parking lots to track the comings and goings of parkers for charging purposes.  Access control may be implemented via "a man in a booth controlling an access gate" or via more automated means. It is not excessively expensive to implement access control schemes, but, for cashout + charges, it is preferable to keep implementation costs as low as possible. 

One Bay Area company has pioneered low-cost, trust-based employee cashout monthly reporting.  Once a month, employees fill out a web-based form to record their commuting and to collect their cashout benefits. With self-reporting by employees, there is risk that employees could "cheat" and collect more benefit that they deserve. The company's periodic mode choice / parking count studies have found that employees under-collect their $4 per day cashout benefit by about 20%. Hence, for this company, self-reporting appears to work successfully.  It is also interesting to note that eBay built their company around the philosophy "people are good." Such self-reporting is in-line with the successful eBay philosophy. 

For implementation of cashout + charges, a company would probably decide that monthly web reporting should not allow double commuting benefits. For days when a worker commutes via modes where the company provides some subsidy or funding, the $4 per day cashout would not be provided.  

A hypothetical self-reporting web screen example is provided below for "Company Y" in San Jose.  Company Y participates in the Commuter Check program, where employees buy transit passes with pre-tax dollars and Company Y subsidizes transit pass purchases.  Company Y has decided that Commuter Check is a sufficiently large benefit that the $4 per day cashout will not also be provided on days when employees commute using Commuter Check.  Likewise, Company Y provides an express commute bus from San Francisco to San Jose for employees, with a company funded cost of $20 per commute per day.  The express bus and $4 cashout are also mutually exclusive.  In this example, there are 22 work days in May.  The employee submits the report and Company Y pays this employee $36 ($40 worth of parking cashout less $4 worth of parking charges).  If an employee parks a car at the office a majority of days, then that employee will owe Company X for parking charges.  

For the Bay Area company's self-reporting system, workers can track their parking once a month, or more frequently. With once-per-month reporting, implementors guess that employees who vary their commutes may tend to be off by a day in their reporting, with errors canceling over the course of a year. Many employees spend less than two minutes per month on their reporting, so the self-reporting system is not burdensome. 

Cities Grant Real-estate Benefit to Virtuous Employers

Discussions with employers have made it clear that there is no one, single benefit that a major employer's real-estate department is looking to obtain from a city in exchange for implementing cashout + charges.  Real-estate situations experienced by different employers vary greatly, influenced partly by the current financial performance of each company.  Some companies wish to expand, some wish to contract, some have severe parking shortages, some have large parking surpluses, some own their land and buildings, some lease their land and buildings.

• Some employers have such severe parking shortages that a 23% reduction in parking demand would provide a huge benefit. For these companies, the value of the daily subsidy for parking a car at the office is much greater than $7.59. These employers may be less motivated to negotiate additional benefits from cities. 

• Some employers would be very happy to reduce parking demand and in-fill directly on the recovered land.  Others would be happy for new development rights to be created that they could sell to others. Some employers would find expedited processing by the City's Planning Department to be of value.  Some companies would want to negotiate for reduced traffic impact fees for their next expansion.  Some companies would ask for tradable rights to reduce impact fees that they could then sell to third parties.  

• One can even envision a "parked car cap and trade system."  For a 35,000-job office park, the number of cars could be capped at current levels.  When an employer with 3,000 employees within the office park implemented cashout + charges, new development credits would be granted to that employer to add new development to bring the car count back up to the cap.  The credits could be traded (sold for profit) within the office park to landowners interested in in-filling.  The parked car cap would effectively cap real-estate development, only allowing new development when virtuous employers reduced cars.  This is a separate grandiose scheme with its own name and web page: http://www.cities21.org/CRIB.htm (Car Reduction In-fill Bonus). 

• It is largely impossible for cities to impose schemes such as cashout + charges on existing development, but cities could readily demand cashout + charges be applied to all new office development, in exchange for approval of new development and in exchange for reduced parking maximums (resulting in lower cost development).  

At $4 cashout and $2 charge, parking revenue does not completely cover cashout cost.  Unless other benefits are created, a company "loses money" for being virtuous.  A example below calculates cashout cost and parking revenue.  For this example, an additional benefit of $1.35 per green commuter per work day would break even. 

The example below is for a typical employer with 80% SOV commute mode share in 2008 and 1,000 employees. Cashout cost and parking revenue under the $4/$2 scheme is calculated for 2012 below. To put this in perspective, in 2008, the employer's annual subsidy to accommodate parked cars is $1.4M - much, much larger than cashout cost.  In 2012 when a 23% commute mode shift is achieved, the potential "car parked subsidy" savings on the 23% of cars that disappear would be $419,000 (at $7.59 per car parked per day), far in excess of the cashout cost.   
 

Cities are hard-pressed to meet climate protection and traffic reduction objectives. Because the cashout + charges scheme is so very effective compared to other policies, cities should reward employers that provide leadership on this scheme. Employers' real-estate departments should ask cities for real-estate rewards.  Cities should be as creative as possible, with staff taking the following perspective: "What real-estate reward should the city provide if the fate of humanity rested on the cashout + charges scheme."   

Expert Opinions:

• Berkeley Professor Robert Cervero (author: Transit Metropolis and America’s Suburban Centers), "Parking lot laden office parks are one of our biggest blights, but they also represent our largest opportunity for in-fill development because of their inefficient use of land."
• Peter Calthorpe (author: The Next American Metropolis) at the Congress for New Urbanism Conference (CNU XIII), June '05: "We new urbanists didn't focus on the growth of office parks. This was a huge mistake. We need powerful strategies for these job centers."
• UCLA Professor Donald Shoup (author: The High Cost of Free Parking) at CNU XIII. "Parking lots within our office parks represent a 'land bank.' Office parks can be transformed in ways that few people now envision."
• Stu Cohen, Executive Director, Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition, 6/15/07.  Cashout + charges "is an exciting and ambitious proposal. It fits in well with the big picture, into the regional smart growth vision blueprint process and with California's 2006 AB32 state climate protection law. In-fill is good. It is a feasible suggestion, but it will require a complicated process. The emphasis should be in the South Bay where the vast expanses of surface parking at offices are. An entity such as MTC might be able to assist. There will have to be a 'grand agreement,' with MTC, Bay Area Council, SLVG, cities, and major Silicon Valley employers backing the proposal. It has been interesting to see South Bay residential projects move forward at the Hitachi and IBM sites. That is an interesting precedent."
   

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

QUESTION 1. "I don't foresee our company ever imposing a parking fee directed towards our employees. We prefer to offer incentives to use alternative transportation (such as our commuter shuttle service) verses implementing a system that penalizes employees. For example, recruitment and employee retention are vital to our success. Telling our employees that they have to pay for parking would not fly."

[Variation on Question 1 from a second employer] "Charging is not in keeping with our culture. We have lots of incentives in place."

Answer 1. Most tech companies have offices in major metropolitan cities where employees pay for parking. There is not a worldwide free-parking policy for tech workers. Google has a New York City office at 76 Ninth Avenue, eBay has their Stubhub development center at 199 Fremont Street in San Francisco, Yahoo has 200,000 square feet at 475 Sansome Street in San Francisco, and Adobe's large San Francisco office is located at 601 Townsend Street. Parking is an expensive hassle at these sites. At major silicon valley job sites, the subsidy for each SOV commuter is $7.59 per day or higher. Well-educated and green-leaning tech workers will understand these facts when they are explained. This education will lead to their being more open to cashout + charges.  We believe that the majority of employees will favor cashout + charges and we will take steps to validate this belief to employers. SOV tech worker commuters have already shown a willingness to pay for other people to adopt transportation alternatives. See the examples in the subsection: "Will SOV commuters be willing to pay others to be green and to not drive?"     

Answer 2. As far as the HR recruiting disadvantage of having your employees pay for parking, we'll have all your competitors also charge for parking, so there won't be a disadvantage. Every office worker in the US will pay for parking. So we're addressing the HR recruitment/retention objection by having all companies hold hands and jump in together (to overcome the Tragedy of the Commons). Further, if you felt it absolutely necessary, your company could just give each employee an equivalent pay raise to compensate for the parking charges.  In the 1990 CH2M Hill example above, CH2M Hill provided a $40 per month raise (a transportation allowance) and charged $40 per month for parking. 

Answer 3: Sticks are much more cost-effective for trip reduction than carrots.  See the section entitled "Parking Cashout Versus Parking Charges." 

Answer 4: We can't meet 2020 CO2 targets without cashout + charges (or some variation).  The fate of humanity rests on your company working in the collective interest with other leading tech companies.  (See the "Camp 1" discussion in the "Grandiose" Section).

QUESTION 2. Charging for parking is regressive, it impacts lower-income workers more than higher-income workers.

Answer: A parking charge-only scheme indeed is regressive. Cashout + charges is progressive. It is not clear to what degree it is progressive, but cashout + charges create a transfer payment from higher-income workers to lower-income workers, because lower income workers use commute alternatives more, so are more likely to collect the cashout reward than higher-income workers.

QUESTION 3. Not all companies are equally located to have access to transit or carpooling opportunities. For some locations, transit options are terrible. Cashout + charges will harm such companies.

Answer: We agree that office locations are not equal. Cashout + charges will make the office real-estate market more efficient, by internalizing the cost of a bad commute location selection that creates negative commute externalities.  Note that the lowest income workers don't work for major tech employers, they are contract workers working for a security, maintenance, or food service contractor. These lowest income workers could be given a different charge/reward scheme, with a lower charge or higher reward. The lowest income workers aren't the first targets of this scheme. And off-shift workers might be deserving of special consideration.

Thanks to

• David Maymudes, Dan, Gary Dillabough, VTA, MTC, James Paxson, Phil Winters, Stu Cohen, Adam Millard-Ball, Mike Bullock, Jeral Poskey, Nathan, Jeff Tumlin,
• The "Fostering Sustainable Behavior," CUTR "transp-tdm," and Sierra Club Bay Area "CONS-CNRCC" list servs
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Collaborative Sustainability Network “Transforming Office Parks into Transit Villages” study provided financial support for cashout + charges research. 
• The Mayor's Green Ribbon Task Force (GRTF) on Climate Protection for Palo Alto and Stanford. The GRTF is a volunteer ensemble, and a variation on this proposal was one of many losing proposals that given consideration.  
• The Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition's "MTC 2009 Regional Transportation Plan Land Use / Climate Change Working Group." A variation on this proposal was one of many losing proposals given consideration. 

- Steve Raney, Cities21.org, http://www.cities21.org/ , Palo Alto, CA

********** even more details ***********

Additional Notes

• Cashout + charges targets reduction in the use of parking spaces, not only reducing traffic and CO2, but enabling smart in-fill.  "Transportation-only pricing policies," such as congestion charging, focus on reducing traffic and CO2, and are thus less effective than the more cross disciplinary cashout + charges. 
• Document is about 5,500 words so far.  Berkeley's Betty Deakin states that we need to develop "customer-centered transportation solutions," designing solutions to meet customer needs.  This document is an example of an application of silicon valley customer-centered product management to transportation solutions.  A product manager builds a persuasive argument to "go forward" with a new product, anticipating customer concerns (in this case we have employers, cities, and employees as the main customer groups, with lesser customers such as landowners, TMAs, adjacent residents, and state/regional government), making a strong financial/benefits case, and explaining the implementation strategy at a sufficient level of detail to be credible (avoiding "gotchas"). This document is an attempt to create a persuasive, action-oriented product plan.
• Cashout + charges is one of the world's most effective carbon reduction measures. It is in the same order of CO2 reduction magnitude as having everyone buy a Prius, at a tiny fraction of the economic cost. And, it's much faster than "turning over" our national auto fleet.
• The innovative July 2002 Moffett Research Park (silicon valley) Draft Transportation Demand Management Plan (by Nelson Nygaard Associates, http://researchpark.arc.nasa.gov/PublicDocs/NRP%20TDM%20Plan%207-10-02.pdf ) envisions a phased traffic reduction approach that will eventually bring about parking charges.  "There will be no free parking on site" during weekdays. At project build-out, daily parking costs will range between $3.40 and $4.20. The large amount of development for this site would normally create a large traffic increase. This would normally require a very expensive road widening to accommodate the traffic, hence the TDM plan was able to save the project $millions by implementing innovative TDM. Employers can substitute a cashout program for parking charges. This project is still in planning, implementation has not occurred. There will be a mix of academic and office uses within this Research Park.  
• An August 21, 2007 (paraphrased) letter from Donald Shoup to Mary Nichols of CA Air Resources Board (CARB) comments on the potential of the parking cash out program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California. "I would like to suggest a promising approach to reducing Greenhouse Emissions: enforce California's parking cash-out law.  This law, enacted in 1992, requires many employers to offer commuters the option to take the cash equivalent of any parking subsidy offered.  CARB is responsible for administering the parking cash-out law, but has not attempted to enforce it.  In 2002, CA's Legislative Analyst issued a report on widespread noncompliance.  The Analyst estimated that compliance would reduce VMT by between 113M and 226M VMT per year.  Few employers comply with the law, or even know about it."  (Unfortunately, this 1992 law may only be applied to a relatively small set of parking spaces where the employer leases such spaces in a separate arrangement from the building lease.)  See also this October 2006 LA Times article: "California State Law Does Little to Limit Free Employee Parking," http://www.planetizen.com/node/21503
• Of course if Peak Oil hits and drives gas prices us to $10/gallon, then we might not need cashout + charges so much. 

Meeting with Prominent Bay Area TDM Consultant, June 30, 2008

• Your effort to charge employees for parking will fail. An employer’s organizational cost for big, new initiatives such as parking charges is huge. Employees can only absorb so much corporate information. Cashout is a complicated-to-explain concept. Parking charges are a complicated-to-explain concept. Combining both is complicated further still. The time spent internally communicating this program (and dealing with objections and questions) will cause delays to other important corporate messages. There is an opportunity cost associated with a company engaging on this issue. Messages about a corporate re-org, an acquisition, or a green solar project will have to be delayed. Your program will suck up a lot of valuable time by exec staff and HR, don’t think that it is simple to implement such a program. You should not underestimate the corporate cost of this program. There may also be fear of an uncontrollable change in corporate culture. 
• There’s no way to get the messaging right. You’re telling 75% of your employees (those who commute via SOV) that they are bad.
• There’s no benefit to a company for cashout + charges. If this is implemented and a huge sea of unused parking develops, the city won’t reward the company that brings this about. But, if a city WOULD allow a company to do something profitable with their virtuously achieved unused parking, then that would help the proposal.
• Your proposed employee survey isn’t going to teach you anything. Employees will lie. They will overstate their future virtuous behavior (per the social desirability effect).
• Even for companies that have buildings with parking shortages, easier, less-effective TDM can be used to alleviate the shortage. The shortages can generally be alleviated with just a small commute mode shift.
• We won’t hit 2020 CO2 goals without parking charges. 50% of CA CO2 is from transportation, we have to cut VMT. Charges are more effective for reducing VMT than all other measures combined.
• The cost problem with parking cashout is that you have to grandfather in all the existing green commuters before you can entice new green commuting. Cashout is a very expensive TDM measure.
• Instead, a state parking regulation is what is needed, and it’s what will work. Companies won’t adopt cashout + charges. A variation on Vancouver’s 2005 parking tax could work. In a world of potential state climate regulations, a parking tax could be perceived by businesses as much less burdensome than more intrusive regulations that would require frequent government monitoring. Smokestack regulations are perceived as much more burdensome and expensive than a parking tax. Companies are used to being regulated, so they are easier to tax than residents or retail stores.   
  • A) be sure the parking tax is positioned as a VMT/CO2 reducer, not as a revenue raiser. B) The Vancouver tax caused business to revolt, and business caused TransLink to be shrunk and to lose power, as well as having the tax overturned. C) Vancouver’s tax was not attached to a goal of VMT reduction or climate protection, that hurt the tax. D) The idea would be that a flexible tax scheme would allow companies to bypass the tax by implementing parking charges or cashout. Regulation would cause companies to cut employee commute trips.
  • 2005 TransLink Parking Tax, Vancouver, British Columbia.  http://www.tc.gc.ca/Programs/Environment/utsp/translinkParkingTax.htm
  • Jan 2006, “Regional Parking Tax Faces Business Opposition In Vancouver,” http://www.planetizen.com/node/18651
• Lastly, CA CEQA makes smart growth illegal. CEQA must be changed to ignore worsened local intersection traffic congestion. Level of Service F intersections are good things when smart growth TOD density results. What CEQA needs to measure is regional VMT impact.  See for example this regional workshop: "LOS Methodologies: Barrier to In-fill" http://www.abag.ca.gov/planning/smartgrowth/technical%20sessions/1/Session%20Materials/SessionNotes.pdf Jeff Ordway(BART real-estate) “pointed out that lower densities score better in CEQA and LOS because they are assumed to have a lower environmental impact.”

Chat with CA State Government staffer, July 2, 2008

• The above TDM consultant is right on. Cashout can't be easily done. And CA's cashout law has limited applicability. We do know that "new green commute startup incentives" are cost-effective, but cashout where you have to grandfather all the existing green commuters is not. 
• To reduce VMT to meet AB32, charging for parking is key. Yes, if the government could mandate a parking tax or charging for parking, we could reduce commute VMT to a level that would be in line with AB32 goals. But, a 10-year-old survey of pricing measures found that parking charges rated the lowest.  Hence, parking charges do not appear to be politically feasible. Folks think free parking is their god-given right.
• And, if employers just started charging for parking, that would bring us to AB32 VMT goals. It's interesting to hear the argument that employers will face an internal hornet's nest with employees if employers propose parking charges. Given the recent gas price rise, it must be that much harder to convince employees to favor parking charges. It's interesting to hear the idea that if a company had 90% of employees mildly in favor of parking charges and 10% strongly opposed, then a company might decline to pursue parking charges because of a very high cost dealing with the 10% to that company. Hence, companies may prefer a state mandate to enable parking charges, as they can't bring about parking charges via an internal political process with their employees. And the government can't mandate charges because of voter opposition, so the government would prefer a voluntary, employer-led program. So both sides wish the other would solve the problem, so there's really no way to meet AB32 VMT goals.
• The federal tax exemption that allows employers to not pay tax on parking that they subsidize for employees is a perverse incentive.

Chat with Don Shoup, UCLA Professor, author: High Cost of Free Parking, June 23

• Be sure that the charge is a daily charge. A monthly parking pass is worse.  Once you  have bought a monthly pass, then parking each day is conceptually free.  (The "park or not" trade-off decision should be apparent each day, in order to "gnaw" at people. This is similar to the thinking behind auto insurance "pay as you go" proposals.)  Further, a monthly scheme can be perceived as all or nothing ("I can't commit to not parking every day, I need to park a couple of times per week.")
• Pfizer in the UK has a good daily scheme.  The "cost" of parking is $4 per day. Workers use proximity ID cards to access buildings and gated parking. (Gated parking is a bit of a daily irritant.) Each employee is given credits each month for a month's worth of parking. Each access to parking draws down these credits.  Unused credits are turned into $4 per day (via payroll) at Pfizer's Sandwich facility (and $10 per day at Pfizer's Walton Oaks site with tighter parking requirements). Shoup explains that carpool riders may swipe at the parking gate, to share the cost of parking with the driver. See a) http://eeru.open.ac.uk/staff/marcus/parkingcashout.pdf (page 2), and b) http://www.ctc.org.uk/resources/Benchmarking/PFIZERGREENTRAVELPLAN.pdf . Pfizer has 5,500 employees at their Sandwich in Kent facility.
• He finds the proposal interesting and is willing to meet to see how some local office folks will react to it. 

Opinions from a Bay Area company’s TDM staff, June 19 meeting

• Self-reporting for cashout + charges won’t work. Without enforcement, there will be too much cheating. You have to have some teeth. The current web-based self-reporting that one Bay Area company has implemented is only for a cashout / carrot.  When you move to charges / stick, then self-reporting won’t work.  Some workers will rebel against the stick and they will influence others to further rebel. 
• As far as cashout + charges making a NY Times story (to tickle CEO egos), there won’t be any interest.  It’s not a sexy story like Google WiFi express commute buses.
• You shouldn’t start with $0.25 charges. That’s a joke. Start with $2. 
• For cashout + charges, leading with an argument for climate protection will not work with our company.  We have a number of workers who have strong political opinions. 
• We undertook an informal “carrot versus stick” investigation of parking charges versus incentives at our company, as part of planning for our growing employee population. We received strong employee pushback about charging for parking.
• For the major employment center in our city, the city’s draft trip reduction plan included parking charges, but this was removed in the final version. 

Complicated (but solvable) implementation details that will need to be addressed

• For office parking located near residential neighborhoods, residential permit parking may be required to prevent spillover parking.  
• Cashout + charges proposes web-based monthly self-reporting.  More complicated and more expensive employee parking accounting systems may also be implemented.  These include
  • Issue daily and monthly parking passes (hung on your rearview mirror) with patrolling to enforce.
  • Fancy, automated parking systems, see for instance: "Paid Automated Smart Parking Design for a Large Office Park," Steve Raney, Intelligent Transportation Systems World Congress, 11/8/05, http://www.cities21.org/ITSWC_SmartParking_071505.doc .)  David Maymudes suggests "adding use" to FasTrak or EZ-Pass transponders, using the regional transit agency's credit card billing system and paying the authority a small percent of revenue for use of their system.  License Plate Recognition systems appear to be getting more accurate and less expensive. 
• Carpooling and Vanpooling may be further incentivized via larger rewards via the monthly self-reporting system.  One Bay Area company has pioneered larger rewards when they pay drivers $4 for each vanpool or carpool passenger.  At face value, this appears be increase the green commute payout to employees.  However, this reward scheme makes drivers motivated to arrange ridesharing logistics and to recruit new passengers.  This may end up being less expensive than companies undertaking the work of ridesharing logistics and less expensive than running private express commute bus service. 

Complexities within this document

• The mathematical calculations are purposely simplified, making them within +/- 20% of their actual, accurate values.  There are differences between shifting commute mode and shifting "cars parked per 100 employees." For example, when commute mode shifts from SOV to carpooling, the average carpool has an occupancy of 2.2 people, so carpools still generate cars that park.  Tax considerations also need to be analyzed. 

• Public policy experts often bristle at the broad use of "Tragedy of the Commons" to explain inability to act collectively.  Policy experts often prefer to apply the Tragedy of the Commons more narrowly to the inability to collectively bring about optimal use of a shared, scarce resource.  In cashout + charges, there two shared resources: "healthy climate" and "developable land." Developable land is scarce.  Healthy climate isn't so much scarce as it is in danger.    

Challenges with Complex Policies

Cashout + charges is more complicated that previous charging/cashout policies.  This complicated solution crosses eight knowledge domains, so is best analyzed in a cross-disciplinary manner.  The eight domains are:  

• TDM: Historical perspective on parking cashout, parking charges, and "Cash for Commutes."
• Employee benefits: Financial/tax implications to employers and employees parking charges, cashout, and transit benefits.
• Land use law: creative development agreements: creating valuable new development rights in exchange for providing public benefit and meeting government policy objectives. 
• Parking: Parking automation and car counting.  Parking charge enforcement. Spillover remedies.
• Smart growth in-fill
• Office real-estate economics
• Suburban political “realpolitic” for trip reduction in major employment centers
• Public policy. Spreading innovation among cities.  “Large innovation” versus incremental application of best practices.  Tragedy of the Commons.

In “How Can Transport Become More Sustainable?” (http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/conf/CP37.pdf , pages 54-62), Martin Wachs explains the difficulty with complex policy proposals. “Societies do not do well with complexity, nor do conference workshops. We need to find a way of reducing our discussion to manageable components, just as we need to find ways of enacting policies through manageable steps and workable components. We need to acknowledge complex relationships among the elements while focusing on them one at a time. We only seem to be able to enact laws and regulations, to take actions, and to set priorities one bite at a time.”

Winners & Losers

Future Research Work Items

• Interview/survey tech employees about their willingness to allow $2 parking charges + $4 per day cashout (given an education about the policy objectives)

• Pitch the proposal to major employers and their cities.  Record feedback.  (Silicon Valley, Irvine, Tysons, Denver Tech Center, Perimeter Center, Bell-Red, etc).  Hold "round table" meetings where appropriate.  Will the diffusion model work?  Who will be first and second movers? What are the real-estate rewards?

• For a given employer, create more detailed financials.  Analyze tax implications and optimize the program accordingly. 

• Convene an initial, small conference call of experts and employers to discuss the policy.  Take a "vote" to ascertain whether this policy is worth pursuing in depth. 

• Develop "an elevator pitch" to explain the concept to decision makers.  Said pitch might become the basis for a future survey instrument for an employer lobbying organization such as SVLG. 

• Canvass funders and national organizations about the nation-wide advocacy strategy. 

• Develop a prototype web-based monthly self-reporting applet. 

• If the real-estate rewards require Development Agreements, develop one or more Development Agreements, creating boilerplate language for future agreements 

• Monitor implementation, measure results, survey affected constituents

• Publish fascinating academic research papers on the topic

• (in the far future) Fund and implement a low-cost, high-tech parking management automation implementation, with access control, car counting, and parking charge collection.  An RFP should be developed, with freedom for technological innovation.  RFP outreach should be made to high-tech web companies with proven interest in "green" or transportation.   

• Susan Shaheen found that "taking away things that people already have," such as the "right to free parking," are extra-difficult, because the impact of having something taken away that you already have is larger than if the policy was implemented from scratch. It might be worth exploring and characterizing this barrier to green policies.   

Employer X Cashout Calculation