Employer-provided parking: Departure time choice, investment decision, and welfare effects

Employer-provided parking (EP) has become a prevalent way to reduce employees' parking delays and late arrivals through offering them free or low-price parking spaces at the workplace. This paper explores the EP effects on employees' trip scheduling, employer's EP investment decision, and commercial parking operator's pricing decision. An analytical trip scheduling equilibrium model is first presented to model the interaction between EP provision and employees' departure time choices during morning commute. A profit maximization model incorporating the employee productivity is then developed to determine the employer's optimal EP investment decision. A competitive game between employer's investment decision and commercial parking operator's parking pricing decision is analytically investigated, together with the effects of EP investment on social welfare. The results show that the EP investment can lead to a win-win situation with decreased employee commuting cost and increased firm production output; and the employer would like to provide only part of the employees with EP services. The competitive game solutions depend very much on the marginal costs of EP and commercial parking spaces. The EP investment with an excessively high commercial parking fee may hurt the society due to decreased social welfare.