University of California Transportation Center

Employer-paid parking is a popular fringe benefit that invites commuters to drive to work alone. Thus, employer-paid parking works at cross purposes with costly public policies designed to reduce traffic congestion, energy consumption, and air pollution. This article (1) explores the problems created by employer parking subsidies, (2) proposes a policy of requiring employers who offer an employee a parking subsidy to also offer that employee the option to receive, in lieu of the parking subsidy, the fair market value of the parking subsidy either as a cash commute allowance or as a mass transit or ridesharing subsidy, and (3) predicts the consequences of the policy proposal with new data derived from research on commuters to downtown Los Angeles.