Testimony on parking tax loophole

The hearing is at 2:00. Comments?

Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee,

I urge you to close this loophole in our parking tax system. Residents of our region make a decision every day to drive, take transit, bike, or walk to work. Research has clearly demonstrated the obvious link between the price of parking and how many people choose to drive or take transit.

Workers are three times as likely to drive if they have free parking than if they make a real economic decision between transit and driving. With our air quality deteriorating and our downtown completely choked with traffic, we must increase non-automobile commuting for our city to continue to grow.

There’s also a simple question of fairness. We are taxing some people and not others; that isn’t fair and it isn’t right. We should level the playing field and this bill aims to close this loophole.

I encourage the Council to add language explicitly dedicating the revenue from this fee to specific programs. I have written several times about this issue on my Web site, Greater Greater Washington, and numerous residents have voiced their concern that this money will simply vanish into the black hole of the enormous DC budget.

To assuage this fear, I urge you to dedicate revenue from this fee to new initiatives that will meaningfully reduce pollution. One option is transit. If the revenue pays for specific, visible service improvements, that will make transit a better option at the same time we discourage driving, and provide some of those impacted by the fee with a meaningful alternative. It’s using the stick to pay for the carrot.

We could also use this money to encourage hybrid taxis. As you are aware, taxis emit a considerable percentage of our pollution since they are on the road almost constantly and idle frequently. The ANC in my neighborhood, Dupont Circle, will be considering a resolution next month asking the DC government to promote hybrid taxis. Two of our ANC commissioners wrote to me in support of this; unfortunately, both have day jobs and were unable to make it today.

In the long run, we should move toward a citywide parking cash-out system for all workers, downtown and elsewhere, that gives people with free parking the opportunity to forego their perk in exchange for a share of the money their employer saves. In the meantime, this bill is a good, market-based first step. It will reduce our subsidy of driving over other modes and close the existing loopholes in our system.

Thank you.