In my Dec. 26 column, reader Paul Guinnessy of Silver Spring offered a proposal for reducing traffic in downtown Washington: Eliminate free parking for federal government employees. A parking charge of about $10 a day would encourage some drivers to take public transit, he reasoned.
Guinnessy said his wife used to work as a contractor for the federal government and noticed that "the majority of civil servants get free downtown parking."
A number of readers took issue with that, saying very few federal government employees get free parking. They scolded Dr. Gridlock for not knowing that.
I asked the Office of Personnel Management how many federal employees get free parking. "We have no idea; it's up to individual agencies," OPM spokesman Edmund Byrnes said. There are 153,000 federal employees who work in the District of Columbia, Byrnes said.
If you know where to find specific numbers on federal employees who get free or subsidized parking in the District, let me know. In the meantime, your experiences are informative:
Dear Dr. Gridlock:
I have been employed at the Department of Justice since 1978. I have commuted from the Virginia suburbs that entire time, and I have never been eligible for free parking. The majority of parking spots go to carpools, and some go to supervisors.
In my organization today, there are 28 government employees. Only our chief gets a parking pass, and 17 employees use Metrochek to subsidize their train, bus or Metro commuting.
Our agency is subsidizing mass transit ridership far more than parking.
Pat Finn
Fairfax
Dear Dr. Gridlock:
As a federal worker employed for almost 30 years in five agencies, it is my experience that free parking for individual drivers has become a mostly rare commodity. I believe that most agencies allocate almost all free spaces to carpools and disabled drivers.
Jim Landolt
Great Falls
