The university's neighbors bitterly opposed the plan, arguing that it would only result in more cars on already congested Seattle streets. The university, moreover, was subject to stringent city ordinances requiring that any expansion plan be linked with efforts to get more students and staff to stop driving to campus by themselves. As if that wasn't enough, university planners calculated that they would have to build five new parking garages both to replace existing surface parking lots slated to serve as new building sites and to accommodate the traffic generated by the new buildings.
How then, to persuade more people to give up on driving their cars to the campus? The answer--which was based on a program that local transit officials had seen at the University of Oregon--was not to order people out of their cars. Instead, the university tried to cajole them with that most basic of tools: prices.
In particular, university officials decided to offer all faculty, staff and students a deeply discounted transit pass and to subsidize the use of vanpools and carpools, while at the same time doubling the cost of on-campus parking. Recognizing that the price breaks alone would not suffice, university officials went even further. Faculty and staff who use the program receive eight guaranteed rides home a year, which they can take advantage of if they have a family emergency or if they unexpectedly have to work late. And the university gave faculty and staff who buy transit passes a limited number of discounted daily parking passes for those days when they absolutely, positively have to drive their cars to campus.
This package, along with some transit service improvements that the university negotiated with local transit providers, produced some dramatic results. The share of those driving alone to campus, for example, has fallen from 33 to 25 percent of all trips, while those using transit increased from 21 to 29 percent of all trips. Consequently, although the university grew by about 10 percent in the '90s, it actually has fewer parking spaces--and a higher percentage of empty spaces--than it did when the decade began.
UW's success is not unique. Dozens of universities around the country have similar programs, and several transit agencies and localities have found that significantly reducing the price of transit can have a major impact on transit use.
Bus ridership in New York City, for instance, increased by about 30 percent after the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the region's transit agency, began offering free transfers between buses and trains in 1997. Ridership further increased when the MTA began offering weekly and monthly transit passes that provide for unlimited bus and subway rides.
Similarly, the transit agency in King County (which includes Seattle) has built on the University of Washington's success by offering a package of benefits and inducements to the region's major employers. Many of those employers are under pressure from both state laws and local land use regulations to reduce the number of people driving alone to work. Like the university, moreover, many of those employers are finding that the programs, which on average have led to 90 percent increases in transit usage at participating firms, have also saved them money because they don't have to provide increasingly expensive parking for their employees. Indeed, the free employer-provided passes and other transportation benefits are so ubiquitous and popular that most of the region's high-tech firms can't hire new employees without offering similar perks.
Federal law, it bears mention, is now supporting these efforts. Until a few years ago, free parking provided by employers was a non-taxable benefit. A free transit pass, however, was taxable. Now, in federal legislation passed at the urging of retiring U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, the playing field has been largely leveled, leading many transit agencies to make a stronger push for employer-provided transit pass programs.
Such efforts are noteworthy because they are in sharp contrast to the past three decades' dominant trends in transit policy. High-cost rail lines were seen as the best way to reverse the declining significance of transit, which now carries less than 2 percent of all trips taken in the nation's urban areas. While such investments are highly touted, a wealth of research has shown that they generally have led to only marginal increases in overall transit ridership, often at extremely high per-rider costs.
Those agencies that have focused on buses, vanpools and other alternatives, however, have learned that if decent transit options are available at significantly less cost than driving alone, people--who are, after all, rational beings--will stop driving alone. It's the first lesson in basic economics but one that many transit agencies have only recently rediscovered.
