Recently I posed a question on social media that went something like this:
If you commute to a full-time job, do you expect your employer to provide you free parking? What about free lunch? Why one, and not the other?
Most of my fellow Americans (and especially Mainers) might consider the question facetious. But is it, really? Or does it point to a set of cultural assumptions that ought to be challenged?
It didn’t take long for someone to point out that the University of Maine, where I work, charges its employees and students for parking. Though the fee is nominal ($50 a year), it didn’t take long for the word “punitive” to come up, either. People feel punished when they have to pay to park at work. But they don’t feel the same about lunch.
I don’t pay the parking fee, because I don’t drive to work. I take the bus, and in warmer weather I sometimes take the bicycle. The University of Maine is one of the few employers in the area that does it right. My Maine Card, issued to all students and employees, gets me on the bus for free, anywhere in system. By charging for parking and offering free public transportation, the University gives people an incentive not to drive. For at least the past fifty years, almost all the incentives have run in the opposite direction.
Maine is a rural state, with a few small cities surrounded by smaller towns. Almost everybody drives. It is therefore considered “normal,” and parking is deemed as necessary as, well, eating lunch. We all have to eat, right? But we are expected to pay for it. People don’t feel punished when they have to shell out five or ten bucks at the company cafeteria.
Of course, you can bring your lunch from home and save the money. And at the University of Maine, you can leave the car at home and keep the fifty bucks. When one of my fellow adjuncts said we should lobby for free parking, my response was, “If you get free parking, I want fifty more dollars in my paycheck.”
There’s a term for this. It’s called “parking offset,” and many companies worldwide have implemented it. Instead of dinging employees for parking passes, they give bonuses to employees who don’t bring their cars to the job. It amounts to the same thing, but one approach looks like punishment and one doesn’t.
I think we can agree that reducing the number of cars on the road is a worthy goal. Yet there is considerable pushback on most means of doing this. The new central bus terminal now under construction in Bangor barely got through the city council. Some people still want the University of Maine to build more parking lots. When a lane of car traffic is eliminated to make room for a bicycle lane, drivers protest. The nearby town of Hampden eliminated Saturday bus service a few years ago, and Hermon doesn’t offer bus service at all.
One respondent to my question said that people shouldn’t be punished for living rurally. I agree, but let’s consider the assumption behind that sentiment. All over the world, cities subsidize rural areas. Services like roads, telephone TV and Internet, mail delivery, and emergency medical care are all more expensive to deliver to rural areas. If you live out in the country and enjoy these things, thank an urban taxpayer.
Seen in this light, paid parking is less punishment than a leveling of the playing field.
This flies in the face of intuition, but intuition can be wrong. Rural residents have larger carbon footprints than their urban counterparts. And car owners don’t pay their fair share of transportation costs. Fees associated with car ownership cover only about half the cost of our transportation infrastructure.
But decades of car-friendly government policies and hidden subsidies for cars have left us with the assumption that free parking is something like a right. It will take a lot to convince people to see it differently.
