For a period of 3 years, I ran a parking pass program for a Pentagon agency. We were allocated x-number of parking spots, and the emphasis was to convince people to accept Metro (you’d get funds added to your card) to use the subway/bus system throughout DC/Arlington. In the beginning, about half the organization did the subway/train/bus routine, and we had around 20 parking spots left-over.
But each year that went by...I’d have five or six people come in and just say ‘enough’....they’d given up on the METRO/bus routine, and wanted to drive into work.
Toward my last year there, the Pentagon was going to give up around 300 parking spots and we were all going to have the bare minimum for drivers...thus trying to force everyone back to the METRO.
The whole METRO/bus program was crap. I’d ridden hundreds of times on it, and you just sat there frustrated. Buses would fail on some route. The subway was aging and they were ten years behind on maintenance. Escalators (some of these tunnels were 300 ft below the surface) would fail and be out of commission for a month. Virtually every single member of METRO needed to be drug-tested. There were various VIP METRO SUVs that you’d see parked at sites, with managers doing virtually nothing.
If you think traffic and parking are bad now, wait 10 years until we have intelligent, self-driving cars.
Your car drives you to work and you tell it: "Orbit this building in charge conservation mode." Thousands of cars don't need to park, they slowly drive around aimlessly. They love traffic jams because that conserves charge in their batteries. They automatically soak up any available on-street parking space for the longest time allowed by law.
This will challenge parking and traffic regulations in ways we have never dreamt of. And, busses will be caught up in the the traffic jams.
The autonomous cars will seldom be in at-fault traffic accidents, but the frustrated human drivers left on the streets will be in plenty, further snarling traffic.
Metro is simply a jobs program; any transportation it provides is incidental. And now they have spent billions extending it through Tyson's Corners - Reston - Dulles, but they still are not performing the required maintenance on the system.