Parking games

Over at the Freakonomics blog by Daniel Hamermesh has this to say about university parking, always an important issue,

Many of my colleagues have had parking spots next to our building, but most of that parking lot is being replaced by a new building — so they’ve been exiled to a garage four long blocks away. This annoys me, but using the lot for a building makes sense; the opportunity cost of the land is far too high to waste on parking. I just hope the building has a lot of square footage so that this valuable land is used intensively.

I wonder, though, whether the people who administer this university thought their choices through. The extra 20 minutes (the walks to/from the garage) are a fixed cost of people’s daily commutes. This additional fixed cost gives them a disincentive to come into the office each day, and an incentive to try bunching their appointments, teaching, and office hours on fewer days to spread the fixed costs.

Since they have some freedom over their schedules, henceforth some of them may be working entirely at home more often. They will become a partial tele-commuter thanks to these changed incentives.

The cohesiveness of the university community might be reduced.

Over at the Free Exchange blog they have this to say,

One obvious point is that a parking lot probably wasn't contributing all that much to cohesiveness in the first place. The university clearly intends to place people in the new building, adding to the agglomeration economies of a dense college campus. By having more students and faculty in a central place, the administration increases the value of being in that place, encouraging more people to spend time there.

The other question to ask is just how costly that four block walk is to most professors. It constitutes just one small part of the entire journey; there are time costs to the rest of the drive, as well as the expense of petrol and added vehicle maintenance, and so on. Tele-commuting would allow a professor to avoid all of those costs, so unless the walk adds significantly to the expense of the trip in, behaviour shouldn't change all that much. The faculty who typically drive have already concluded that the cost of the trip is worth the benefit of coming to campus.

I guess some of the faculty may, at the margin, find the value of the walk particularly costly but I would not expect this to deter too many people. Of course having some of the staff stay at home could be a good thing!