Parking beef

I was thinking about parking today. In particular, parking for work.

With the exception of one job from 2000-2003, all of my places of employment had free parking. I am beginning to realize that this is highly unusual. I don't have a lot of stories from friends about their parking costs and parking peeves, but I do think that it's highly unfair that some people should have to deal with the expense of parking while others do not. The reason I have an issue with it is because there's no rhyme or reason for parking costs. Calgary parking in its downtown core is among the top 3 highest parking rates in North America. Yet our property values aren't in line with New York City prices. So where's the inequity creeping in?

City Hall doesn't seem willing to offer any kind of relief from high parking costs, because they've already gone on record as saying they would rather people took transit to work. My retort to that stance is that if we actually had an efficient, reliable transit system that took less than an hour to get you from one side of the city to the other in rush hour, I'd be OK with that. But we don't. Before anyone setting transit policy has their say on this issue, I challenge them to use nothing but transit for one month, for everything, then get back to me. Don't even get me started on the $3 per day parking fee at the transit park and ride lots.

I think that where possible, parking should be a job perk. But it should be a perk that still leans toward promoting transit use. So perhaps companies could offer half priced parking or a free monthly transit pass. I fear that this would only motivate parking lot / garage owners to raise their prices even higher.

In highly concentrated work centres like hospitals, they not only charge a fortune for parking, there isn't even enough parking to go around, as there are waiting lists. Worse, you might get a parking spot, but have to park a great distance away from your building, depending on a shuttle bus to get you to and from your car. Here's a secret little piece of trivia - doctors get free parking at the big medical centres and they are the closest spots.

Maybe the problem is that everyone needs to pay for parking, no matter what. Maybe companies that are fortunate enough to have their own parking spaces on their own properties need to contribute a parking tax to the government to help pay for roads.

I don't know what the solution is, but the whole idea bugs me.