Hybrid-work parking: how to allocate fairly when supply is constrained

Almost every workplace we onboard has the same problem: 400 employees, 220 parking stalls, and three days a week where everyone wants to come in at once. The HR team got tired of fielding angry emails about reserved spots and asked facilities to "figure something out." So facilities builds a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet gets gamed by the salespeople who come in early, and within six months you're back where you started.

There are three strategies that actually scale. None of them is "first come, first served" — that's a fairness illusion that rewards whoever lives closest. Here's how to pick:

Strategy 1 — Round-robin lottery. Every employee gets the same odds every day. Win the lottery, you get a spot; lose, you take the train. This is the *fairest* in a strict statistical sense. The downside is it's emotionally exhausting — people hate not knowing if they have a spot until 6am. Best for properties where transit is reliable and the gap between "got a spot" and "didn't" is small (e.g., a 10-minute walk from the train).

Strategy 2 — Tenure-weighted. Each year at the company adds a small weight to your lottery odds. A 5-year veteran has 2× the chance of a new hire. This rewards retention but penalizes new employees during onboarding — exactly when you want them in the office. We've seen this work best at law firms and consulting firms where seniority is a fact of life.

Strategy 3 — Manager-priority + lottery for the rest. Reserve 30% of stalls for VPs and team leads. Lottery the remaining 70% among everyone else. This is the most *politically* stable: senior people stop complaining, junior people see a fair shake. The downside is you're publicly admitting that hierarchy matters in parking, which some companies are squeamish about.

The fairness toggle that ties them together:

ParkDwell lets you mix all three. You can run a 70/30 manager-priority allocation that's also tenure-weighted within each tier. You can swap algorithms by day-of-week if Fridays are different. Whatever you pick, the *audit log* is what makes it work — every allocation decision is logged with the inputs, and any employee can see why they got (or didn't get) a spot. That transparency is what stops the complaints.

The single biggest mistake: trying to do this manually. We've watched facilities teams burn 8 hours/week to a spreadsheet that an algorithm could solve in 200ms. If your turnover is high enough that you're re-running this every Monday, you've already lost the time-vs-tool tradeoff.