The law of unintended consequences, or how to follow the letter of the law, but not the spirit

First a few stipulations:

I'm no friend of surcharges that cannot be avoided, like the fuel surcharge that some shipping lines charge. There really is no point in having a separate surcharge unless you want to steer behavior with it, so that people either avoid actions imposing costs covered by the surcharge, or only take those actions when they are ready to pay the surcharge. The fuel surcharge might as well be included in the ticket price, as you as a passenger can not book your ticket and tell the shipping company "transporting me will not increase your fuel consumption, so please don't add the fuel surcharge."

On the other hand, I am a big friend of surcharges on costly add on services, say parking, or the use of expensive payment cards (Do note that some payment cards are less costly than cash to the retailers), as these can make the customer take into account all the costs of their actions.

With that out of the way, I was a bit amused having read this article on Ryanair's latest invention when it comes to card use surcharges in the UK. Ryanair imposes various surcharges for bookings paid by card. British laws stipulate quite sensibly that there has to be some payment method which consumers can choose that avoids the surcharge. In other words, the costs of the cheapest payment method should be embedded in the costs of the products, and surcharges should then be imposed on more expensive payment methods, enabling consumers to make an informed choice as to whether they for example think that paying with their American Express rather than a debit card is worth the surcharge.

Now Ryanair started of in 2009 offering no surcharge purchasing to anybody using a prepaid MasterCard. The idea behind this was of course that most people wouldn't have a prepaid MasterCard and would thus pay Ryanair's inflated surcharges of £6 per person per direction (of course this makes no sense from a cost perspective, as the costs for processing card payments is not contingent on number of persons or number of flights). But this still made it possible to avoid paying the surcharges to Ryanair, and thus a potential source of profit was not fully exhausted. So now Ryanair launches it's own prepaid card and, yes you guessed it, only by using this card you'll be able to avoid the surcharges. And of course, obtaining the card, using it and even not using it will carry costs, which you pay to... ...Ryanair.

So there you go, the sensible law to protect consumers is honored in letter, but not in spirit.

On allocating costs

A debate about who should bear the cost of building parking spaces has flared up in Helsinki. When new houses are built, they are required to build a certain amount of parking spaces. This amount is some quota based on the number of apartments built. In downtown Helsinki and the inner-city suburbs this means in practice building underground garages under the houses. This is not a cheap exercise, studies put the average cost per parking space at 40 000 euro. This cost is typically borne by all the apartments in the house, irrespective of whether the inhabitants have a car or not. 

Lately this has lead to some discussion as to whether this is a good system. Today's Helsingin Sanomat interviewed the chairman of the Helsinki City board on the issue. He claims that it would be unreasonable to demand that only those who use the parking spaces would pay for them. Why? "A civil servant or teacher couple cannot afford to pay 40 000 euro, buyt they may still need a car." So therefore the cost of the parking space should be split among all the inhabitants. 

This is a very interesting argument, especially coming from a representative of the main right of center Coalition party. Personally I'd be tempted to extend his argument. 

Consider a house with apartments of two sizes. The larger apartments might be too expensive for the civil servant or teacher couple described by the chairman. The obvious solution is for the owner of the smaller apartment to subsidize the cost of the larger apartment, so that the teacher and civil servant can afford to live there.

Another solution would of course be for those who want a parking space to pay the actual costs of it, and if they cannot afford it, either move to somewhere cheaper, or get rid of their car, if they don't consider it to be worth the cost.