You realize that a small minority of the people seeing those ads actually live in SF, right? The TV stations showing those ads cover at least 9 counties, many of which have a higher population that the ~900k people living in San Francisco.
If it takes me 40+ minutes longer to ride a subway than drive in (currently true) then it's both me and my employer's interest to reduce cost barriers and pay for the downtown parking.
Tragedy of the commons with a touch of government inertia
The article is arguing against government subsidies, not business choices. Businesses are providing a benefit, parking, that is not taxed as income. If that benefit was taxed in the same way income was, it would be more expensive for both businesses and consumers and therefore businesses and consumers might make other choices about transit (or location).
Further, I would argue that the time for your commute is to a large part determined by the available infrastructure (roads vs subway lines vs busses, for example), which is something the public has chosen to allocate funds for. There are certainly more and less efficient ways to move people around, and I'm not saying that cars are better or worse, just that the efficiency is partly a choice the public has made.
The issue also, why it take 40 minutes longer to take a subway than to ride in? That is not just the market, it's also often to do with zoning, separating residential and commercial, restricting height, and also things like requiring that all apartments have parking spaces. Similarly, policies prioritizing roads and parking in the city spread out the centre of the city, making it less pleasant to live in the centre rather than the suburb, and impractical for getting around on foot, or by public transport. A market might just as well be responding to government incentives, as much as driving the thing itself.
> If it takes me 40+ minutes longer to ride a subway than drive in (currently true) then it's both me and my employer's interest to reduce cost barriers and pay for the downtown parking.
Or it's in both your interests to decrease the time it takes to use public transport.
Automobiles are quite possibly one of the most harmful things in societies. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, pollution, sprawl, time wasted going from A to B.
My life improved dramatically when I decided to reject the automobile as a way of life.
EDIT: I am of course referring to personal automobiles.
Neither nuclear bombs or silly putty enabled the mass delivery of food and goods everywhere in the country, and for people to live outside of tiny apartments in congested cities in smaller towns and rural areas offering clean air, big yards, and more access to the outdoors.
The fact that Americans have substantial increased their average living space and comforts is directly correlated with the spread of automobiles. The massive increase in food production is entirely caused by automation from the invention of farming equipment running off internal combustion engines.
I don't think there's any proof that they are related. If you look at cities where automobile use is proportionally lower (London, NYC, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Copenhagen), I don't think people there would have lower life expectancies. And if they did, it's more likely due to pollution.
Its lower, but is it nonexistent? I take a cab in Shinjuku and I'm still in traffic.
The parent seems to be actually talking about AUTOMOBILES in more than just the modern scope. There is a bit of a bigger paradigm shift at play here if you were to consider a world without automobiles.
I used to work construction. I usually had to drive 15 to 45 minutes to get to a job, which could be almost anywhere. No way could I walk, bike, or take public transport. Cars are wonderful but I understand wanting to make them cleaner, more appropriately sized, and more efficient in general.
How do you think things and people get to and from farms?
Before the invention of the automobile we were an impoverished agricultural nation where huge numbers were forced to work brutal farm jobs to feed themselves and the rest.
Obviously it's to the only factor, but the ICE gave us the ability to mass farm food and products and deliver them throughout an enormous country. It directly influenced where people could live, and how well they lived.
Its the effect of the death of Feudalism. That was, I'll (because I'm of a better social class) decide where you live based on (current) socioeconomic status and historically, race, and I'll decide where you're allowed to work, shop, recreate, meet people, and obtain services such as medical care, based on how far you can walk on two feet. There's a desperate push to re-enact this, keep the peasants back on the farm and under control. Nothing could be more important than tying, say, political opinions, to the ability to obtain Uber or Peapod. Imagine the power of being able to literally starve someones family or strand them in the middle of nowhere merely for having the wrong political opinion... Nothing is more small D democratic or freedom oriented than the automobile. And many people hate democracy and freedom.
Obviously you have to consider the pros and cons of the ICE on human history and progress beyond just listing what you believe are direct negative consequences of depending on cars in modern society.
I'm never going back to hauling a week's worth of groceries through the snow from the bus stop. Nor cutting my weekend with my girlfriend short so I can make the last train back to my city on Sunday night.
You'll have to take my car from my cold, dead, broke hands :p
Are you going to continue to try playing devil's advocate by saying you live next a farm and don't need a refrigerated truck to drive produce to your grocery store, or are you now seeing what I'm saying here?
What does refrigerated food have to do with personally owned automobiles? Or are you referring to the transportation infrastructure that allows the delivery of refrigerated food to grocery stores?
What you're saying is a bit different than the premise I argued against from parent, effectively (an oversimplification, but...): "Automobiles are bad"
I come from a bias being from Silicon Valley, but when I moved to the south, it is IMPOSSIBLE to work without a car. I mean, as a developer, I can work from home, but our corporate overlords would like me in an office.
Are you aware that there are cities which have no feasible public transportation?
To get rid of "personal transport cars", you would also require a massive paradigm shift. Not just in city planning, or introduction of public transport, but with how people live as well.
A massive "unrooting" of our current structures would need to take place, with a rapid replacement of more sustainable transit options. I actually find it valuable, in the longterm, but no one will agree with me.
Yep, we need progress and good urban planning. Some places (like the Netherlands) have embraced cycling, for example, because of its many benefits. There's lots of good info about this particular case study over at Wikipedia[1], and also check out the recent NYT article[2]. Here's a good quote:
> More important for the nation’s bottom line, the country’s preference for the bicycle could save its economy $23 billion each year, according to a recent study done at Utrecht University and published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study suggested that the Netherlands’ vigorous cycling habits prevented 6,500 premature deaths each year.
We use the tax code to subsidize lots of stupid stuff and shouldn't do any of it if you want a fair, progressive tax system. Especially when running enormous deficits.
Free parking should be reported as income, as should mass transit discounts/subsidies, such as healthcare subsidies, etc.
Why not institute a carbon cap and trading market, so internal combustion engines pay their external costs, and not subsidize anything? in that case renewable technology investment will be much more attractive without the costs of government picking ideas from only the best funded lobbyists (like Solyndra and the friends of Gore).
I could never quite figure this out. It seems to be actually more hassle, in terms of paperwork and reporting, to pay for your employee to park a work vehicle during work hours while on a job made at your request (which is entirely a business expense) than it is to pay for them to have a reserved city centre parking space (which could easily have a significant personal benefit component).
The other weird thing is: I don't even think the employee has to use it! Would their SO find such an arrangement useful? Well, there you go: they could use it instead! There really don't appear to be any restrictions on this stuff. It's extraordinary.
On the flip side: this does mean, if you're negotiating a new job, maybe you could think about trying to get them to pay for a parking space for you, if that would be useful. Because it's entirely a business expense and so cheaper than raising the salary.
I'm trying to figure out the mental somersaults it has to take for this to seem reasonable to you.
The natural state, empty field, nothing there. I can park there. For Free.
Unnatural state, roads and buildings. My ability to park has been taken. I've had value taken from me. I'm at a negative.
Government / businesses grant the right to park in some places. I'm at less of a negative but still negative of the natural state. I don't see how that's possibly putting me at a positive "income"?
If your employer owns a house, and let's you stay in it for free, that's definitely compensation to you. A parking space is no different. The base state is not that you're a allowed to park wherever you want, but rather that it's private property and you're not allowed to park unless someone permits you to.
If your business is located in an area with free parking available to all, that's not income.
If your business is located next to a parking garage that costs $400 a month to park in, and it pays the $400 each month so you can park for free, that's income to you.
Imagine your CEO makes $1M a year. But he tires of his high marginal tax rates, so instead negotiates with the board of directors to only take a $500k salary while the company pays a $5,000 a month lease on his $200k car, a $20,000 a month rent on his $2M condo, and $200,000 a year for his parking, premium healthcare, meals, groceries and personal travel expenses.
Should he only pay taxes on his $500k in cash compensation now?
A popular libertarian maxim is "Your rights end where my rights begin." This is usually ignored in discussions about unaccounted for externalities like pollution. Why do you have the right to pollute my (our) air with your automobile?
Spoken like someone completely oblivious to the costs they're offloading onto everyone else. The liberty of people who want to breathe clean air, walk down streets that aren't noise- and fume-choked hellscapes, or who don't want to pay for your subsidies, the police & EMTs to show up & clean up your car wrecks - what of their liberty? It's a simple concept.
That's fine, just pay for the societal costs you impose while exercising such a liberty. The article isn't is talking about taking away the liberty to drive, but rather not subsidizing it through tax loopholes. It's kind of a libertarian perspective, actually.
We do pay. We pay taxes when buy cars. We pay taxes when register cars. We pay taxes when buy gas.
Perhaps you can understand why those of us who put liberty above almost everything on the scale of desirables get squeamish when we hear the about more taxes being needed.
And self driving cars, could make this worse. If your car has shocks for stop and go traffic as well as for bumps, you might not mind a 3 hour commute if you can instagram, and even do work from it. Meaning more people will live further away so they can get their half acre of land.
But self-driving cars never need to circle looking for a parking spot, and can head off to the dense "autopark" to hang out until you need a ride home. That will alleviate congestion.
I would argue it just displaces it. Instead of you needing to walk to the parking lot and get jammed in after a high traffic event (Sports, or Concert), the auto parked cars will have issues getting out, and lining up in the street to pick everyone up.
How is that worse than the same thing with human drivers? All of that parking lot space could be repurposed as loading space for humans, and more humans would probably be happy to use a cheaper ride-share service in which they can take the first available car instead of waiting for their personal vehicle to get through the line. (Note that ride-share isn't going to be "register with a particular car and wait for them to find you", but rather "get in the nearest available car"--automated taxis instead of automated Uber).
Or even better: it will drive off to pick up random people in an Uber/Lyft scenario, so your car makes you a small amount of money while you're working by itself.
Seems like it could go either way. The hope is that self-driving cars will alleviate stop-and-go traffic (they have faster reflexes and better ability too coordinate than humans). Further, fewer cars could support more people (not everyone will want to own their own car if Lyft can get them to and from work for $0.50/mile). That said, humans are uncanny in their ability to consume (faster network speeds, better processors, cheaper storage, etc).
The next step - and my favourite future scenario - is the self-driving motorhome that picks you up from work and drives you to the beach while you eat dinner or sleep.
I suspect there will be a few hackers who do this to avoid paying SF/ SF Bay prices while doing their internships.
Especially as more "No motor home parking" signs go up.
On a more serious note, this just sounds awesome and could work towards workforce mobility as well. Unfortunately, people commuting in RVs will probably make traffic a lot worse.
We moved 46 miles outside of Atlanta in anticipation of self-driving becoming much cheaper and accessible. We may not benefit from it in our working career but I now have 25 acres that my daughters/spouses will be able to build on. Looking 25 years out it just made more sense fiscally for our family than buying in a subdivision again. ...plus we grow a portion of our own food.
I have a remote job and am looking at a setup like this. Land seems like a very valuable commodity and I would like a lot of it. The peace of having distance between neighbors, the ability to grow food, building structures (I'm thinking workout equipment), having some animals. It seems like the ideal set up for me and I do really think self driving will allow people to work further and further away. I think it will also help normalize remote work, when you regularly work for an hour on your commute, it should be easily transferable that you work at home.
This isn't going to be a problem in reality. Most people will not care about owning their own self-driving car, IMO. It will, in fact, be a waste of the owner's resources to park them, much like airlines do their best to keep their jets off the ground and earning revenue.
Ever wonder why Uber has a higher valuation than General Motors? This is why.
You're trying to tell me I live in a place where people are way less likely than average to use Uber to go everywhere and don't buy cars while I am telling you the opposite is the case.
I don't know what you're talking about, man. The resources are there for people to call an Uber every time they want to go somewhere, but that isn't what most people do.
SDC would not need parking close to the place they drop you of and if you could use the time you spend in the car to work that would mean people with an hours commute would arrive an hour later at work, and people with two hours commute would arrive two hours later at work. In effect rush hour would be stretched out through the day - and as somebody who goes at different times a day, that makes a massive difference to road usage.
At my company, commuter parking perks only apply when driving to and parking at a transit station, then taking public transit to work. That seems like a net benefit for society vs driving the entire distance to work.
Interesting dive into the tax code. I wonder how the article would have read if the author researched the amount of subsidies that go into public transportation. Public transport subsidies are a very material portion of most city budgets as rider's fares typically pay for less than half the cost of running the bus/subway/light rail system.
As an example San Francisco spends about $1 billion of its $9 billion city budget funding Muni - more than 10% of the entire city budget.
I am not sure how it was calculated but the article did do that (but it seems like an underestimation):
"True, there’s also a tax benefit for mass-transit commuters that costs the government about $1.3 billion a year. TransitCenter says that while it’s good as far as it goes, “it is overshadowed by the parking tax benefit’s much larger adverse impact.”"
You're correct but this tidbit also exposes the article's limited scope. It's sweeping the cost of public transportation under the rug and then providing unsubstantiated opinion on the "adverse impact" of the thing the author doesn't like.
To be clear I'm not arguing for or against parking or public transportation. But I do think we should be forming policies with more data and less opinion.
That's not quite the same thing. What you quoted is referring to the IRS tax exemption for the first $255 per month spent on approved commuting costs (parking and mass transit).
What mgreg refers to is the direct money that is used to fund/subsidize the cost of operating bus/train networks in urban areas. The cost of those tickets are less than they would be without the subsidies.
Subsidies go into public transit, but for a reason. Even if you drive and never use public transportation you benefit from it by having freer movement in the roads. The whole point isn't that such a subsidy exists, it's asking whether it's a subsidy we actually want to be making. Additionally, it's not surprising that it makes up a large portion of city budgets, because city governments have the most narrow and local focus of any other in America. They're often not even on the level of county government, let alone state government.
Drivers don't pay the full cost of maintaining the roads, so if it's a question of which system we should subsidize, I'd rather subsidize mass transit. It has less environmental impact and takes up less space.
Roads that go through rural areas don't pay for themselves because they have little traffic. But those are also not the areas where anybody is talking about adding lanes to the roads. And in the areas with actual congestion, tax on the gas burned driving on those roads more than pays for them.
If we're playing this game, we could go a step further than that and say that roads with little traffic need little maintenance. Roads with more driving will need to maintained on a more regular basis. If someone has data/knowledge that this isn't true, though, please let me know (genuinely, as I can't find any information about this).
Also, for the record, adding lanes doesn't reduce traffic congestion[1]. Not sure if you were saying that. Even if we did "profit" from building more lanes/roads, it's only because we're externalizing other costs (environmental damage, the cost of space/real estate, etc.). I don't think this is a good strategy.
> If we're playing this game, we could go a step further than that and say that roads with little traffic need little maintenance.
The majority of road maintenance costs are caused by the elements rather than cars.
> Also, for the record, adding lanes doesn't reduce traffic congestion
They found that if you add road capacity, people use it. But nobody (except China) spends the money to add road capacity unless they expect it to be used. They just hand wave that away.
It's obviously true that if you add roads people will drive more, but the idea that it's physically impossible to build enough road capacity is ridiculous. As if you could build a twelve lane superhighway at the South Pole and cars would appear out of nowhere to fill it with traffic congestion.
False
"Nearly as much of the cost of building and maintaining highways now comes from general taxes such as income and sales taxes (plus additional federal debt) as comes from gasoline taxes or other “user fees” on drivers."
http://www.frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/who-pays-roads
Not to mention the value of the land that is set aside for roads and parking. How much property tax is the city forgoing by dedicating that land to cars rather than homes or offices? How much cheaper would our costs of living be?
Also, a major reason costs of construction and maintenance on public transportation are so high is that they have to do it in a way that minimizes the disruption to car traffic. Yes roads are cheaper to build than subways, but if they could shut down a whole street and build light rail at surface grade it would be a lot cheaper (which is why streetcars and cablecars were ubiquitous a century ago). Or if they could shut down 4th street for a year, the Central Subway would be done already.
The difference is that cars have way more externalities than transit does. Pollution, noise, danger to others, space taken, cars are way worse at all of these.
Cities quite rationally want people to walk and use transit more, because those modes fit the fabric of a city better. Of course you'll still need car trips for some things, but a blanket subsidy like this for something you want less of is nonsense.
I feel like this is almost an apples-to-oranges comparison. Yes, public transit "competes" with cars, but...
Is the government subsidizing something run by the government really "subsidization?" It may be federal vs state/city, sure, but I don't see this as being a problem, especially since public transportation is beneficial in so many ways (costs people less money than car ownership, less harmful on the environment, less harmful to health, etc.). I do, however, see it as a problem when the federal government subsidizes private transportation, which is objectively harmful to cities (and most things in general, really).
> rider's fares typically pay for less than half the cost of running the bus/subway/light rail system
Let's not forget that drivers also only pay for half of the cost of roads[1]. If we're only going to pay for a portion of something, I think it should be public transportation. In my mind, the whole point of the government is to provide us with services. Providing us with transit makes sense. Providing us with spaces that we can only use if we pay a bunch of money to private corporations (car manufacturer + oil companies mainly) to buy large, dangerous, private, pollution-creating machines? I'm opposed to that.
> Is the government subsidizing something run by the government really "subsidization?"
Yes. Having the government do anything with public money is subsidization.
But it often makes sense to do things like that, especially in areas where there is a large up front cost to build something and thereafter the cost per use is negligible.
It makes sense for the government to build subways in cities and then charge zero dollars to riders, because everyone benefits from their existence (even non-riders, like stores whose customers arrive on the subway) and once the construction cost is paid it makes no sense to discourage use of the sunk-cost infrastructure by charging fares. And fare collection is inefficient because a nontrivial proportion of the fares are spent collecting them.
But it also makes sense to do the same thing for roads for the same reasons.
The real question is where and when to subsidize each. It makes no sense to build subways in rural Kansas that no one would ride, or new roads in Manhattan.
When you see traffic congestion, the question is how to most effectively eliminate it. Sometimes that means improving mass transit so less people have to drive. Sometimes it's more cost effective to just add a lane to the road.
Sometimes the underlying problem is that real estate prices are too high causing people to have to commute too far and the only real answer is to build new housing.
>The real question where and when to subsidize each. It makes no sense to build subways in rural Kansas that no one would ride, or new roads in Manhattan.
I can agree with this to some extent, but the question is, "how can we do this without encouraging unnecessary sprawl?" I can understand the want for space, seclusion, etc., but at what cost? How do we build roads in rural areas that don't kill the environment while also not creating a ginormous network of roads throughout our entire country which allow tons of people to own cars and rely solely on them for all travel? I am not necessarily opposed to people living in rural areas, particularly because some of it is necessary (e.g. for farming), but for the most part, I think we'd be better off if most people lived in higher density areas. Not Manhattan-dense, but would it kill people to live somewhere with a population density of 10k/sqmi? I grew up in a town with 15k/sqmi and lived in a big house with a big backyard (and even a driveway!). We had good public transit.
> Sometimes it's more cost effective to just add a lane to the road.
I replied to this in another comment of yours, but this actually doesn't work.
>Sometimes the underlying problem is that real estate prices are too high causing people to have to commute too far and the only real answer is to build new housing.
A large part of the reason that real estate prices are high is because of cars. I live in Downtown LA, and within a 2-block radius of me, there are probably at least ten parking lots that could easily fit large apartment buildings with ground retail. To add insult to injury, they're all single-level lots, rather than multi-level structures. When you take into account the minimum parking requirements that are imposed on developers, the amount of space that freeways take up, how wide the roads are, and all the free parking on the streets, it's no wonder that housing costs a lot! In essence, the same thing that allows people to commute long distances in cars is what makes it necessary to do so.
> How do we build roads in rural areas that don't kill the environment while also not creating a ginormous network of roads throughout our entire country which allow tons of people to own cars and rely solely on them for all travel?
Nobody is actually proposing to build a bunch of new highways in rural areas. The real problem is congestion in cities.
> I replied to this in another comment of yours, but this actually doesn't work.
It does work, it just doesn't work linearly. You can add a lane and discover that there was already a lane's worth of unsatisfied demand. And maybe there were even two. But there most certainly were not 1,000,000 lanes worth of unsatisfied demand, and in most places there probably weren't even two.
> A large part of the reason that real estate prices are high is because of cars.
A two bedroom apartment is at least five times the size of a parking space, so the area allocated to parking is less than 20%. That is not the main source of the cost.
Of course, minimum parking requirements are still ridiculous, because if landlords can attract tenants to a less expensive building without parking, why stop them?
And is is requirements like that which combine with each other to cause high housing costs.
I have to think some significant portion of parking benefits paid to suburbanites are getting used on park-and-ride, and so are in a sense subsidizing public transport. Certainly that's where mine go.
Car drivers impose a large externalized cost upon any city, from traffic and congestion, to local pollution and its health consequences, to increased accident rates. We've gotten used to those costs, and to the degree that we are even aware of them, we've accepted them as the price of our convenience.
Transit systems do not impose such high externalized costs per commuter moved, but no doubt they are less convenient for individuals.
if people couldn't drive to your cities, your city would become an abandoned wasteland of crowded concrete and glass.
people like you have gotten use to enjoying all the tax and revenues from people who do not think like you, like use a car, but become unaware its subsidizing your amenities (such as mass transit).
Public transit is a road subsidy. Transit provides 23% or the transportation in San Francisco in a lot less than 23% of the space. If that was to disappear, SF would need 50% more road space for a similar level of congestion. That would cost a lot more than $1 billion.
The IRS says companies must place a fair market value on free parking they provide, and must report as income any value of free parking in excess of $255/month. Compliance with this reg is likely minimal.
It seems to me if I have to drive to a specific location to perform a job-task, the expense of getting there and parking there is a deductible business expense. This is true as long as you are not regularly commuting to a place of business.
Once you start regularly commuting, the cost of the commute is no longer a deductible business expense. And if you are being given a place to park worth more than ~$10/day you're supposed to pay full load of taxes on that "income".
So, if for example, you regularly work from home, you can deduct the cost of going into the office.
That's a huge subsidy for working from home at least 50% of the time which this report totally ignores.
To claim that not taxing as income the first $10/day in parking value provided as a fringe benefit is a $7b tax subsidy seems a bit of a stretch. The company also likely provides air conditioning in the office, do we tax that as income too? To say nothing of food catering, onsite gym, etc.
I read the actual report linked in the article and IMO it comes off as somewhere between "progressive money-grab" to "bat-shit crazy."
The reality is the IRS has a long-standing "don't ask don't tell" policy around all kinds of benefits that companies provide employees which are "technically gross income" but in practice are never actuallly counted as such. A common example is the value of frequent flier miles. Here's a paper on the subject: http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
That last link is a gem -- here's a great quote from it;
"Gross income is all accessions to wealth, clearly realized, over which the taxpayer has dominion unless excluded by statute, or by the IRS's never having attempted to tax them, or by the IRS's having announced an administratively created exclusion pursuant to no specific authority whatsoever."
The paper explains the historical definition of income as meaning, "the realized product of labor or capital." That definition was challenged before the Supreme Court back in 1955 Glenshaw Glass when the IRS claimed punitive damages were taxable as income. Before Glenshaw, punitive damages were considered a windfall, and as neither a product of labor or capital, not income and therefore not taxable.
Some specific examples of accessions to wealth, clearly realized, which are not taxed by the IRS for no reason other than administrative fiat are; child support payments, welfare payments such as TANF, and Medicaid.
I supposed you could add "parking at the office" to that list.
Another great example in that paper -- the cost of traveling to a job interview in another state. The reimbursement of that cost is clearly income under statute, but not taxed. Thankfully so!
Are fish income when you catch them from the sea? Are minerals income when you pull them from the ground? Are Bitcoin income when you mine them? No, No, and YES!
Still reading that last paper -- just so damn amusing;
"Two final examples suffice to show the array of situations in which the administrative application of the positive definition of income seems confused. The first involves the iconic American game of baseball. When contemporary players began to threaten long established home run records, it was clear that any ball that broke such a record would become a collector's item worth substantial amounts of money. When the records began to be broken and a fan caught the record-breaking ball, the tax controversy erupted. Practitioners, academics, and former IRS Commissioners all agreed that catching the ball, like finding old currency in a used piano, which was held to be income in a case known to virtually every student of taxation, resulted in the realization of income. But the public and Congressional outcry at such a prospect was fierce. How could the joy of catching the record breaking-ball be marred by the prospect of the rapacious IRS pursuing the fan for a cut of the food fortune? Legislation to ensure non-taxation was introduced. One IRS Commissioner, not a lawyer, dissembled. Years later, the Chief Counsel of the IRS, not only a lawyer but a tax lawyer, reportedly covered his head with his hands and captured the difficult position the agency was in when he responded to the question of whether the fan who caught and kept the ball had income by saying, "Please don't ask me that!"
Want to have as if by magic HN flip on this topic?
Here: coffee/soda/lunch/dinner that companies provide to its workers are income and workers should pay taxes on it. It should be presumed that the value of a "coffee" benefit is the price of similar coffee at Starbucks, "Soda" benefit a price of similar soda at a ball park, etc.
> the government is subsidizing commuters to drive themselves to work instead of carpooling or taking mass transit or walking or biking or working from home.
I would imagine in the majority of scenarios this is a false choice. There simply is no reasonable alternative. Our city planning was piss poor and thought it was a good idea to emulate Atlanta when it comes to road building (i.e. build them wherever the hell, with no rhyme or reason). Biking: not an option. Working from home? If I were to be so lucky.
Second, not much thought was given to the economic impact of those commuters.
It's true that we tax some sorts of "implicit income" but not others.
Another example, which many people find very strange: taxing homeowners for their implicit rental income:
Imagine Person A owns a house and lives in it. Person B owns one house, which he rents to someone else, and lives in a rented apartment. Person B has rental income and pays tax on it. Person A does not receive rental income (from himself) and therefore pays no equivalent tax (and also receives other tax preferences). In some ways, this appears to be inequitable. But to many people, it would be odd to tax a transaction that never explicitly happened (A only "paid himself rent" implicitly).
So a case can be made for taxing all sorts of things, some of which seem very odd to many/most people. Employer-provided parking will probably remain untaxed, just like employer-provided food often is.
The difference is that one is a business and the other isn't. A landlord can deduct depreciation on the building and operating expenses that the homeowner can't.
And the homeowner pays income tax on the money used to buy the house.
It's amazing the return on mass transit spending. The property values are massively increased in cities with mass transit, the economy is massively increased in cities where it's easy for employees to get to work, the environment has less smog going into it from cars, citizen mobility is increased which increases quality of life and their ability to spend the money they make at their jobs....and on and on.
There's just endless returns on mass transit.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadThe irony, most ads show a car in an empty highway.
You realize that a small minority of the people seeing those ads actually live in SF, right? The TV stations showing those ads cover at least 9 counties, many of which have a higher population that the ~900k people living in San Francisco.
If it takes me 40+ minutes longer to ride a subway than drive in (currently true) then it's both me and my employer's interest to reduce cost barriers and pay for the downtown parking.
Tragedy of the commons with a touch of government inertia
Further, I would argue that the time for your commute is to a large part determined by the available infrastructure (roads vs subway lines vs busses, for example), which is something the public has chosen to allocate funds for. There are certainly more and less efficient ways to move people around, and I'm not saying that cars are better or worse, just that the efficiency is partly a choice the public has made.
Thus if it's in their interest to lobby for a tax code with distortative effects, they will.
Or it's in both your interests to decrease the time it takes to use public transport.
My life improved dramatically when I decided to reject the automobile as a way of life.
EDIT: I am of course referring to personal automobiles.
The fact that Americans have substantial increased their average living space and comforts is directly correlated with the spread of automobiles. The massive increase in food production is entirely caused by automation from the invention of farming equipment running off internal combustion engines.
The parent seems to be actually talking about AUTOMOBILES in more than just the modern scope. There is a bit of a bigger paradigm shift at play here if you were to consider a world without automobiles.
No car: walk/bike to the store/work; get aerobic exercise
Car: sit on your ass and pump harmful fumes and CO2 into the atmosphere and let your muscles and bones atrophy away
Before the invention of the automobile we were an impoverished agricultural nation where huge numbers were forced to work brutal farm jobs to feed themselves and the rest.
You'll have to take my car from my cold, dead, broke hands :p
Problem solved :p
Your entire diet would be different if cars werent around.
I come from a bias being from Silicon Valley, but when I moved to the south, it is IMPOSSIBLE to work without a car. I mean, as a developer, I can work from home, but our corporate overlords would like me in an office.
Are you aware that there are cities which have no feasible public transportation?
To get rid of "personal transport cars", you would also require a massive paradigm shift. Not just in city planning, or introduction of public transport, but with how people live as well.
A massive "unrooting" of our current structures would need to take place, with a rapid replacement of more sustainable transit options. I actually find it valuable, in the longterm, but no one will agree with me.
> More important for the nation’s bottom line, the country’s preference for the bicycle could save its economy $23 billion each year, according to a recent study done at Utrecht University and published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study suggested that the Netherlands’ vigorous cycling habits prevented 6,500 premature deaths each year.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/world/europe/bicycling-ut...
You should try to be more specific. Otherwise folks will ignore the bits of truth mixed into the hyperbole.
Free parking should be reported as income, as should mass transit discounts/subsidies, such as healthcare subsidies, etc.
I could never quite figure this out. It seems to be actually more hassle, in terms of paperwork and reporting, to pay for your employee to park a work vehicle during work hours while on a job made at your request (which is entirely a business expense) than it is to pay for them to have a reserved city centre parking space (which could easily have a significant personal benefit component).
The other weird thing is: I don't even think the employee has to use it! Would their SO find such an arrangement useful? Well, there you go: they could use it instead! There really don't appear to be any restrictions on this stuff. It's extraordinary.
On the flip side: this does mean, if you're negotiating a new job, maybe you could think about trying to get them to pay for a parking space for you, if that would be useful. Because it's entirely a business expense and so cheaper than raising the salary.
I'm trying to figure out the mental somersaults it has to take for this to seem reasonable to you.
The natural state, empty field, nothing there. I can park there. For Free.
Unnatural state, roads and buildings. My ability to park has been taken. I've had value taken from me. I'm at a negative.
Government / businesses grant the right to park in some places. I'm at less of a negative but still negative of the natural state. I don't see how that's possibly putting me at a positive "income"?
The mastodons and giant sloths did not claim property rights over the land.
That's not the "default" state.
If your business is located next to a parking garage that costs $400 a month to park in, and it pays the $400 each month so you can park for free, that's income to you.
Imagine your CEO makes $1M a year. But he tires of his high marginal tax rates, so instead negotiates with the board of directors to only take a $500k salary while the company pays a $5,000 a month lease on his $200k car, a $20,000 a month rent on his $2M condo, and $200,000 a year for his parking, premium healthcare, meals, groceries and personal travel expenses.
Should he only pay taxes on his $500k in cash compensation now?
People, Americans especially, want the liberty to come and go as they please, at the speeds they choose, by the path that they choose.
I'm not sure every Bloomberg writer would understand that.
For the rest of the country, Google Maps is generally glowing green.
EDIT: wording
Perhaps you can understand why those of us who put liberty above almost everything on the scale of desirables get squeamish when we hear the about more taxes being needed.
Could net you a few hundred bucks a month if you don't use parking at work.
On a more serious note, this just sounds awesome and could work towards workforce mobility as well. Unfortunately, people commuting in RVs will probably make traffic a lot worse.
Ever wonder why Uber has a higher valuation than General Motors? This is why.
Not yet.
Disagree? Explain Uber.
Are you even arguing the same point that I am?
The benefit is to the employer, not the employee.
Proposing to tax this as an employee benefit will likely sidetrack this and raise emotions due to the unfairness.
That's too bad because there is a real problem and a tax may very well be the best way to solve it.
As an example San Francisco spends about $1 billion of its $9 billion city budget funding Muni - more than 10% of the entire city budget.
"True, there’s also a tax benefit for mass-transit commuters that costs the government about $1.3 billion a year. TransitCenter says that while it’s good as far as it goes, “it is overshadowed by the parking tax benefit’s much larger adverse impact.”"
To be clear I'm not arguing for or against parking or public transportation. But I do think we should be forming policies with more data and less opinion.
What mgreg refers to is the direct money that is used to fund/subsidize the cost of operating bus/train networks in urban areas. The cost of those tickets are less than they would be without the subsidies.
These are two totally separate things.
If it's cheaper too, that'd be great.
Roads that go through rural areas don't pay for themselves because they have little traffic. But those are also not the areas where anybody is talking about adding lanes to the roads. And in the areas with actual congestion, tax on the gas burned driving on those roads more than pays for them.
Also, for the record, adding lanes doesn't reduce traffic congestion[1]. Not sure if you were saying that. Even if we did "profit" from building more lanes/roads, it's only because we're externalizing other costs (environmental damage, the cost of space/real estate, etc.). I don't think this is a good strategy.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand
The majority of road maintenance costs are caused by the elements rather than cars.
> Also, for the record, adding lanes doesn't reduce traffic congestion
They found that if you add road capacity, people use it. But nobody (except China) spends the money to add road capacity unless they expect it to be used. They just hand wave that away.
It's obviously true that if you add roads people will drive more, but the idea that it's physically impossible to build enough road capacity is ridiculous. As if you could build a twelve lane superhighway at the South Pole and cars would appear out of nowhere to fill it with traffic congestion.
Also, a major reason costs of construction and maintenance on public transportation are so high is that they have to do it in a way that minimizes the disruption to car traffic. Yes roads are cheaper to build than subways, but if they could shut down a whole street and build light rail at surface grade it would be a lot cheaper (which is why streetcars and cablecars were ubiquitous a century ago). Or if they could shut down 4th street for a year, the Central Subway would be done already.
as drivers pay for none of the cost of maintaining the roads.
Cities quite rationally want people to walk and use transit more, because those modes fit the fabric of a city better. Of course you'll still need car trips for some things, but a blanket subsidy like this for something you want less of is nonsense.
Is the government subsidizing something run by the government really "subsidization?" It may be federal vs state/city, sure, but I don't see this as being a problem, especially since public transportation is beneficial in so many ways (costs people less money than car ownership, less harmful on the environment, less harmful to health, etc.). I do, however, see it as a problem when the federal government subsidizes private transportation, which is objectively harmful to cities (and most things in general, really).
> rider's fares typically pay for less than half the cost of running the bus/subway/light rail system
Let's not forget that drivers also only pay for half of the cost of roads[1]. If we're only going to pay for a portion of something, I think it should be public transportation. In my mind, the whole point of the government is to provide us with services. Providing us with transit makes sense. Providing us with spaces that we can only use if we pay a bunch of money to private corporations (car manufacturer + oil companies mainly) to buy large, dangerous, private, pollution-creating machines? I'm opposed to that.
[1] http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/01/23/drivers-cover-just-51-...
Yes. Having the government do anything with public money is subsidization.
But it often makes sense to do things like that, especially in areas where there is a large up front cost to build something and thereafter the cost per use is negligible.
It makes sense for the government to build subways in cities and then charge zero dollars to riders, because everyone benefits from their existence (even non-riders, like stores whose customers arrive on the subway) and once the construction cost is paid it makes no sense to discourage use of the sunk-cost infrastructure by charging fares. And fare collection is inefficient because a nontrivial proportion of the fares are spent collecting them.
But it also makes sense to do the same thing for roads for the same reasons.
The real question is where and when to subsidize each. It makes no sense to build subways in rural Kansas that no one would ride, or new roads in Manhattan.
When you see traffic congestion, the question is how to most effectively eliminate it. Sometimes that means improving mass transit so less people have to drive. Sometimes it's more cost effective to just add a lane to the road.
Sometimes the underlying problem is that real estate prices are too high causing people to have to commute too far and the only real answer is to build new housing.
I can agree with this to some extent, but the question is, "how can we do this without encouraging unnecessary sprawl?" I can understand the want for space, seclusion, etc., but at what cost? How do we build roads in rural areas that don't kill the environment while also not creating a ginormous network of roads throughout our entire country which allow tons of people to own cars and rely solely on them for all travel? I am not necessarily opposed to people living in rural areas, particularly because some of it is necessary (e.g. for farming), but for the most part, I think we'd be better off if most people lived in higher density areas. Not Manhattan-dense, but would it kill people to live somewhere with a population density of 10k/sqmi? I grew up in a town with 15k/sqmi and lived in a big house with a big backyard (and even a driveway!). We had good public transit.
> Sometimes it's more cost effective to just add a lane to the road.
I replied to this in another comment of yours, but this actually doesn't work.
>Sometimes the underlying problem is that real estate prices are too high causing people to have to commute too far and the only real answer is to build new housing.
A large part of the reason that real estate prices are high is because of cars. I live in Downtown LA, and within a 2-block radius of me, there are probably at least ten parking lots that could easily fit large apartment buildings with ground retail. To add insult to injury, they're all single-level lots, rather than multi-level structures. When you take into account the minimum parking requirements that are imposed on developers, the amount of space that freeways take up, how wide the roads are, and all the free parking on the streets, it's no wonder that housing costs a lot! In essence, the same thing that allows people to commute long distances in cars is what makes it necessary to do so.
Nobody is actually proposing to build a bunch of new highways in rural areas. The real problem is congestion in cities.
> I replied to this in another comment of yours, but this actually doesn't work.
It does work, it just doesn't work linearly. You can add a lane and discover that there was already a lane's worth of unsatisfied demand. And maybe there were even two. But there most certainly were not 1,000,000 lanes worth of unsatisfied demand, and in most places there probably weren't even two.
> A large part of the reason that real estate prices are high is because of cars.
A two bedroom apartment is at least five times the size of a parking space, so the area allocated to parking is less than 20%. That is not the main source of the cost.
Of course, minimum parking requirements are still ridiculous, because if landlords can attract tenants to a less expensive building without parking, why stop them?
And is is requirements like that which combine with each other to cause high housing costs.
Transit systems do not impose such high externalized costs per commuter moved, but no doubt they are less convenient for individuals.
It depends; in New York, it would be incredibly inconvenient for me to own a car to go from our apartment in upper manhattan to my job in midtown.
people like you have gotten use to enjoying all the tax and revenues from people who do not think like you, like use a car, but become unaware its subsidizing your amenities (such as mass transit).
It seems to me if I have to drive to a specific location to perform a job-task, the expense of getting there and parking there is a deductible business expense. This is true as long as you are not regularly commuting to a place of business.
Once you start regularly commuting, the cost of the commute is no longer a deductible business expense. And if you are being given a place to park worth more than ~$10/day you're supposed to pay full load of taxes on that "income".
So, if for example, you regularly work from home, you can deduct the cost of going into the office.
That's a huge subsidy for working from home at least 50% of the time which this report totally ignores.
To claim that not taxing as income the first $10/day in parking value provided as a fringe benefit is a $7b tax subsidy seems a bit of a stretch. The company also likely provides air conditioning in the office, do we tax that as income too? To say nothing of food catering, onsite gym, etc.
I read the actual report linked in the article and IMO it comes off as somewhere between "progressive money-grab" to "bat-shit crazy."
The reality is the IRS has a long-standing "don't ask don't tell" policy around all kinds of benefits that companies provide employees which are "technically gross income" but in practice are never actuallly counted as such. A common example is the value of frequent flier miles. Here's a paper on the subject: http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
Referenced in that is another paper called "Defining Income" which seems to be the definitive paper on this topic? https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=0370821220680890...
"Gross income is all accessions to wealth, clearly realized, over which the taxpayer has dominion unless excluded by statute, or by the IRS's never having attempted to tax them, or by the IRS's having announced an administratively created exclusion pursuant to no specific authority whatsoever."
The paper explains the historical definition of income as meaning, "the realized product of labor or capital." That definition was challenged before the Supreme Court back in 1955 Glenshaw Glass when the IRS claimed punitive damages were taxable as income. Before Glenshaw, punitive damages were considered a windfall, and as neither a product of labor or capital, not income and therefore not taxable.
Some specific examples of accessions to wealth, clearly realized, which are not taxed by the IRS for no reason other than administrative fiat are; child support payments, welfare payments such as TANF, and Medicaid.
I supposed you could add "parking at the office" to that list.
Another great example in that paper -- the cost of traveling to a job interview in another state. The reimbursement of that cost is clearly income under statute, but not taxed. Thankfully so!
Are fish income when you catch them from the sea? Are minerals income when you pull them from the ground? Are Bitcoin income when you mine them? No, No, and YES!
"Two final examples suffice to show the array of situations in which the administrative application of the positive definition of income seems confused. The first involves the iconic American game of baseball. When contemporary players began to threaten long established home run records, it was clear that any ball that broke such a record would become a collector's item worth substantial amounts of money. When the records began to be broken and a fan caught the record-breaking ball, the tax controversy erupted. Practitioners, academics, and former IRS Commissioners all agreed that catching the ball, like finding old currency in a used piano, which was held to be income in a case known to virtually every student of taxation, resulted in the realization of income. But the public and Congressional outcry at such a prospect was fierce. How could the joy of catching the record breaking-ball be marred by the prospect of the rapacious IRS pursuing the fan for a cut of the food fortune? Legislation to ensure non-taxation was introduced. One IRS Commissioner, not a lawyer, dissembled. Years later, the Chief Counsel of the IRS, not only a lawyer but a tax lawyer, reportedly covered his head with his hands and captured the difficult position the agency was in when he responded to the question of whether the fan who caught and kept the ball had income by saying, "Please don't ask me that!"
Here: coffee/soda/lunch/dinner that companies provide to its workers are income and workers should pay taxes on it. It should be presumed that the value of a "coffee" benefit is the price of similar coffee at Starbucks, "Soda" benefit a price of similar soda at a ball park, etc.
I would imagine in the majority of scenarios this is a false choice. There simply is no reasonable alternative. Our city planning was piss poor and thought it was a good idea to emulate Atlanta when it comes to road building (i.e. build them wherever the hell, with no rhyme or reason). Biking: not an option. Working from home? If I were to be so lucky.
Second, not much thought was given to the economic impact of those commuters.
Another example, which many people find very strange: taxing homeowners for their implicit rental income:
Imagine Person A owns a house and lives in it. Person B owns one house, which he rents to someone else, and lives in a rented apartment. Person B has rental income and pays tax on it. Person A does not receive rental income (from himself) and therefore pays no equivalent tax (and also receives other tax preferences). In some ways, this appears to be inequitable. But to many people, it would be odd to tax a transaction that never explicitly happened (A only "paid himself rent" implicitly).
So a case can be made for taxing all sorts of things, some of which seem very odd to many/most people. Employer-provided parking will probably remain untaxed, just like employer-provided food often is.
And the homeowner pays income tax on the money used to buy the house.