This is helping us how?

Most New Yorkers commute to work using mass transit. There's a great benefit available to mass transit users called Transitchek -- it allows you to purchase up to $105 in transportation each month, pre-tax. The $76 monthly MetroCard I buy costs the equivalent of something like $50, post-tax. Commuters save a little money, the city keeps a few cars off the streets, companies save a bit on their payroll taxes -- it's a great deal all around.

Except when the program is expanded to include, and here I quote from the literature one of my colleagues sent me, in a bid to get my company to offer this new benefit, “qualified parking, that is, parking provided to an employee on or near the business premises of the employer or on or near a location from which the employee commutes to work by transportation for which a transit pass is used, in a commuter highway vehicle, or by car pool."

Which is to say, you can now drive your car into the city, park it in a lot near your office, and pay for it using up to $200 pre-tax dollars a month. You can also pay for "park and ride" facilities at commuter train and bus stations, which presumably encourages people not to drive their cars into the city, but the colleague who is agitating for this told me that if we offer this benefit, he will buy a car and start commuting that way. I'm hoping there's a more gracious way of saying no to him than are you out of your fucking mind?