April 15th, 2009
Commuter Conundrum
There’s an article in yesterday’s NYT City Room about the so-called “Bike Commuter Benefit”. The author points out that commuters can only choose one benefit per month, meaning multi-modal commuters like myself are left to choose between the higher transit benefit or the bicycling benefit. Here’s an excerpt:
For instance, a commuter who rides a bike to a subway stop, locks up at one of the city’s fancy new bike parking kiosks and gets on the train or a bus can take a credit only for the MetroCard or other approved mass transit—up to $120—or take the more paltry $20 for cycling. Will cycling New Yorkers give up $100 tax-free dollars a month to make a point about riding their bikes?
“The math kind of answers that question,” said Noah Budnick, senior policy adviser for Transportation Alternatives, the transit advocacy group.
I agree with Mr. Budnick; as much as I’d like to take the bike benefit as a matter of principal, for now I’ll be sticking with the higher transit benefit as a matter of practicality.
To address this dilemma in the law, Rep. Blumenauer of Oregon has introduced a bill called the “Multimodal Commuter Credit” which would “amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow employees to receive transportation fringe benefits for the same month both in the form of transit passes and reimbursement of bicycle commuting expenses.“
Kudos to Rep. Blumenauer!
Read the full article in the NYT →
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9 Responses to “Commuter Conundrum”
Go Earl (Bumenauer)! Gotta love that guy. So happy to be an Oregonian.
That NYT article is incorrect — the transit benefit went up to $230/month at the beginning of the year to match the parking benefit. Unfortunately, my employer hasn’t caught up to the law quite yet but they’re updating the transit benefit policy this May, I think they said.
Hmmm, $230 or $20/month…. It’s not a hard choice to make for me.
Good catch. Thanks, Fritz!
Now, I’m totally not arguing against reimbursing cyclists, but let’s not stop riding bikes just because bus riders get more reimbursement. I would figure time into the equation. My commute is 40 minutes per day on a bicycle versus 120 minutes per day on a bus. I’m losing 80 minutes of my time every day that I commute by bus rather than by bicycle. Let’s say I commute 20 days per month. That’s 1600 minutes or almost 27 hours of extra commute time in exchange for 210 extra dollars (230-20=210). i.e. less than $8 an hour to ride the bus versus ride a bike. If you’re making $8 an hour at work, you’re better off to stay at work longer and bike home. If you make more than $8 an hour ($16320 per year), it seems like foolishness to spend so much time on so little money. I’d say the choice is easy, but I’d stick with the bike.
Y’know, I hate to be a naysayer, but this is precisely why the country’s in the shape we’re in. Earl Blumenauer’s a great advocate for biking, but also an advocate for commuter rebates of $20 (or preferably more) per month for people who supposedly are riding their bikes to work, or at least to their nearest mass transit hookup (whether Metro subway, bus, or light-rail surface train). But how do we enforce this ? What assurance do we have –as taxpayers — that people purportedly riding their bikes to work are REALLY riding bikes to work? Especially in this situation where he is lobbying for BOTH subsidies to be allowed for someone who is multi-moding their commute? I rode a bike to work in DC for 27 years, working for the Feds, and never had a bike commute subsidy. I really didn’t NEED one, either, because the money I was saving by NOT driving into town, or taking the expensive Metro system, yielded far more cash ‘rebate’ than any subsidy could provide. That’s why I did it. Be very careful what you wish for here, people. Your back pocket is being raided for THIS and a lot of other special interest ‘subsidies’ that are going to make your ensuing April 15th tax submissions ever more painful. Just RIDE your bikes, darn it…and pity all those folks standing there with their hands out…waiting for a handout (from YOU). Wake up…and smell the folks from IRS and Congress digging ever deeper into your retirement funds.
@Geoff…and how do we account for the Billions of other dollars the government wastes or misspends? In the grand scheme of things a few hundred dollars a month for a mass transit or cycling commuter in this day and age is chump change, if it will keep people out of their over subsidized metal boxes I am all for it. FWIW I live in an area where neither mass transit or cycle commuting exists to any great degree and a job is good, if it happens to include a paycheck that is considered a good fringe benefit.
Aaron
@Geoff
This is not money coming from the government. This is money your employer is allowed to give to you tax free as a benefit.
Now, I am super fortunate because I work for an unbelievably cool company that started giving relatively equal benefits to all of its employees. We have a choice of one and only one of the following: Half our parking paid for, a monthly transit pass, or a biking/walking stipend added to our paycheck.
My company was doing this long before the stimulus package made it a write off, and the benefit is much better than the measly $20 – but it’s not tax free because it’s more than $20. That stipend made it possible for me to upgrade my bike last fall, to buy lights so I could ride all winter, and so on.
Seems a shame to give the car commuters a benefit that is a tax write off but the bikers cannot. There’s no proof the people are carpooling either.
I work in the DC area, and my company gives us a choice: free parking, or a certain fixed amount of money for the mass transit system. The fixed money pays for about half the month of transit, but I’m not at maximum fare. It probably only pays for about 1/3rd or 1/4th for those folks. In my case, the bike is a fantastic supplement. By riding one direction every day, I can stretch my benefit to the whole month. Obviously every big city is going to be different given benefits, access, and cost, but I know of many people who prefer to pay than take mass transit. Parking at the subway is $4.50, the bus is $1.25 – yet more people park than ride. And I don’t think people really capture the true cost of commuting by car, anyway:
1.) If driving takes less time, you still have to factor in “exercise time” that day.
2.) Average cost per mile is ~0.48 in insurance, depreciation, wearable parts, and gas. SUVs can be as high as .55+ per mile.
For some reason, people tend to write off the cost of driving as fuel-only. It doesn’t even take into account active vs. passive time – that is, stuck in traffic and forced to concentrate vs. reading the paper on the subway.
But who ever said people were rational? Now if I can get a supplement for patch kits, innertubes, and various maintenance sundries – that would rock.
I have a transit benefit at work; we get bus fare reimbursed at the end of each month. Mid-winter, I often buy a pass and get reimbursed for that. Other times if there’s a bad spell of weather or whatever, I get a day pass (something I love about our system) and get reimbursed for those. When it’s nice, I just ride my bike & don’t worry about it. :)
I have this calendar in Excel that I turn in every month with boxes colored in for biking or busing (I drive about once or twice a month), and you can definitely see weather trends over the year. January is all blue (bus); August is all tan (bike).
I do very occasionally go multi-modal — a few times this winter when the morning was icy but the afternoon was nice — but I still get reimbursed for the bus fare.
It would be nice, for sure, to get some incentive for the biking, and the tax structure thing is pretty goofy. For me personally, though, most of the year the cycling is its own reward.
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