What's a Parking Space Worth?

Image generated by DALL·E, OpenAI's image-generation AI.

What is the value an office parking space?

Does a parking space help a person get to work? Or does it actually subsidize the least efficient commute mode imaginable? As a company owner or manager, you need to realize that each car parked in your lot represents hundreds of dollars a month in after-tax salary and 10-15 hours/week of stress, frustration, and lost productivity.

What is the throughput of your parking lot? A curb near your building's entrance can be a bus stop, enabling 100s of drop-offs and pickups per day; or it can be occupied all day by two or three cars.

If one parking space is occupied by a single-occupant vehicle (SOV) commuter who came from a few miles away, and another is a vanpool vehicle that arrived full of highly paid engineers from a great distance, which space is providing more value to the company? Which one is helping reduce congestion, making travel across the entire region more efficient?

Given all this, what is the right amount of parking for your office?

Is the SOV commute a necessary evil you need to accommodate, or would you be better off leveraging technology to enable and encourage flexible, reliable, affordable alternatives?