Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
It flat-out doesn’t make financial sense for a family to take the train downtown from the burbs. We did it sometimes as a kind of civic duty and to get the kids comfortable on the C-Train. But it’s way cheaper and easier to drive and park.
Even for a single rider, the value proposition is questionable. $8 for a round-trip vs $13 a day for me to park during the week. I mostly take the train, but I don’t feel irresponsible when I splash out the extra $5 for the convenience of driving. And of course on weekends, driving and parking is the way to go.
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Depending on a number of variables (trip length, your car, maintenance intervals, how you get to the train station) you're paying another few-several dollars on car operating costs, so you're probably paying double. Which doesn't change your point unless you scale it to daily, and then the question is monthly discounts for parking vs transit.
Monthly transit probably offers more utility/opportunities for non-commute use than monthly parking, but that doesn't mean we should charge more for it. Yet it seems we often do.
$8 day-max CPA lots charge $115.50 per month (14.5 days breakeven). Compared to $8 return fair translating to $126 monthly transit (31.5 trip breakeven). A $10 max lot is only $126. There's a bunch of different lots and breakeven seems to be anywhere from 12-21 days
https://www.calgaryparking.com/find-parking/passes.html
We also tend to price parking much lower for times of lower demand (e.g. $2 max evening/weekend), but we don't do that for transit. Which is understandable to an extent, but we do more creative and strategic things for parking (flex passes that give a discount) that we don't really do for transit (no discount on a ticket book, though it doesn't expire as fast as a flex pass)
Every use of parking means a vehicle trip with associated negative externalities like utilizing expensive+scarce resources (road lanes), while most transit trips mean the opposite. There's a bunch of [bad] policy reasons for this, like allowing so much private parking competition - underutilizing those lands (lower property taxes) and driving CPA prices down. We could/should turn CPA into a monopoly and charge higher prices to subsidize transit. Of course this would be unpopular with suburbanites who also love to complain about traffic and property taxes that are directly increased by car dependency policies.