Not only did Columbus, Ohio win the USDOT’s recent Smart Cities Challenge, but now it’s got one of the best ideas we’ve seen recently. There’s “a surge of redevelopment downtown, but office rents are tumbling and vacancy rates are on the up. The problem, business leaders say: Lack of parking.” But instead of trying to waste space by building more parking, “following a vote by downtown property owners last week. they’ll buy transit passes for about 43,000 employees, paid for primarily by the 550 building owners in the area.”
The decision follows a successful pilot that ran from June 2015 through January 2017, which doubled the share of bus commuters among 844 employees at four companies in the district from 6.4 percent to 12.2 percent.
If those results can be replicated across the entire downtown district, “Capital Crossroads estimates that it would free up 2,400 parking spaces—about four parking garages—and allow for 2,900 more people to work in the district,” according to the Columbus Dispatch. “Between 4,000 and 5,000 people would trade their cars for COTA on their commute, the district estimates.”
Columbus’s program shows an optimism among downtown property owners—who have everything to lose—that cars aren’t everything.
In some ways, Columbus’ solution is a textbook “transportation demand management” strategy to nudge drivers out of single-occupancy cars, and reduce congestion, pollution, and road wear. San Francisco, Boulder, Cambridge, and others have TDM ordinances requiring developers to include transit-oriented amenities in new properties. Cities all over the country require developers to pay infrastructure impact fees, which often feed transit budgets. And employers often help cover the cost of their employees’ transit passes.
But this program will be the first in the country where bus passes are directly funded by property owners, according to Cleve Ricksecker, executive director of Capital Crossroads, and many cities are keeping a watchful eye on its deployment. “The more people who think about this, the more sense it makes,” Ricksecker told the Columbus Dispatch.
There is deep and rather remarkable logic coming to the surface here. As the famed transportation scholar Donald Shoup has put it, the true costs of parking are largely hidden from drivers. Developers, property owners, employers, and cities subsidize the costs of parking infrastructure because of the seemingly un-severable connection they make between car access and economic viability. Columbus’s new program adds capacity to the number of commuters downtown can handle, and it also shows an optimism among property owners—who have everything to lose—that cars aren’t everything when it comes to a thriving downtown economy.
Transportation demand management isn’t a silver bullet; many programs that pay commuters to take transit rather than drive have not yielded enduring behavioral changes. Some critics say that courting transit commuters with free passes takes the pressure off transportation authorities to build the higher-capacity, higher-frequency service that would organically attract more riders.