Commuters Don't Stop Driving to Work Unless You Take Away Free Parking

Congress recently reestablished parity for commuter tax benefits, granting people who take transit into work as well as those who drive in and park at the office the same $255 a month in 2016. With that basic fairness intact, the question becomes whether or not the rule will change rush-hour travel choices in any substantive way. Given the bump in transit benefits, you might reasonably expect fewer employees to drive in alone, but the evidence suggests you’d be wrong.

Fairness has never been the only goal of transit benefits. When Congress codified “transportation fringe benefits” in the early 1990s, transit users got their token share not just for equity’s sake but with the idea that such tax breaks would help balance out city commuting patterns. If that hope wasn’t explicit in the laws, it was embedded in their interpretation; here’s the Congressional Research Service’s assessment of such benefits to the Senate, in 2010: