USA Today has a story on what cities are doing to combat congestion, including a video of a few Minneapolis commuters taking the road less traveled:
What is important here, is the transportation official interacting directly with various downtown employers, which can get discounted transit passes in bulk whereas an individual without said agency-company agreement ends up paying the full fare. The transit agency gets the kind of ridership they need for a variety of reasons, the City gets reduced congestion, and we all get less CO2 spitting internal combustion, overproduced "freedom-making" contraptions.
What many companies end up doing however, is to roll the amount of a monthly transit pass into the salaries of their employees under a misguided attempt at providing "choice." What ends up happening though, we end up pocketing what amounts to little more than a couple of dozen dollars per month and spend several times more money on gas, parking, and car ownership/maintenance than we would otherwise. Perhaps we think it is more convenient, but in the end it wastes our own money, time-saved is often a wash, and the entire city loses money due to man-hours lost in congestion as idling cars belch and fart poison into the air you and I breathe.
Point being, we don't always make the choice that is in our own best interest despite theorists' attempts to suggest we always do/would/should/could in some imaginary perfect world. Sometimes we do need a little softly paternalistic "nudge" of an opt-out system. If companies participated in a program where instead of providing parking for their employees as well as travel stipends of say, $100 a month, they could save on both and buy passes for all of their employees at $50 a month (hypothetical), thereby giving all of their employees essentially a free transit pass to use at their discretion.
If nothing else, the excuse "my car broke down" would no longer be valid for showing up late to a meeting or shift.
Monday, July 26, 2010
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4 comments:
El Centro College in Downtown offers free DART passes to all its student who are enrolled at least 6 credit hours. Funny thing is that public transportation in Dallas is not highly promoted so a lot of students don't take advantage of it.
As D-Rod noted, a lot of universities are now offering universal transit access for students, and sometimes faculty and staff. Mine (UC Riverside) is among them- swipe a UCR ID and you ride for free, regardless of your affiliation with the university. Our city government does the same.
In "The High Cost of Free Parking", Donald Shoup notes a program in San Jose that allows employers to buy universal transit access for all of their employees at set, annual costs. The prices paid are ridiculously cheap, too- small employers pay a maximum $144/year/employee, and the prices go down depending on location and number of employees. http://www.vta.org/ecopass/ecopass_corp/eppricing_static.html
I'd like to see transit agencies across the country follow VTA's lead and standardize this sort of arrangement, rather than negotiating it ad-hoc like most do today.
Washington State has a Commute Trip Reduction law that sites with over 100 employee must keep the number of peak SOV trips under 60% of employees, but they can implement whatever programs they want to meet the requirement. Microsoft runs its own minibus system, for example. The UW UPASS program has been particularly successful since they control all parking on campus so they've used the pricing option. They've also heavily invested in bike infrastructure. Something like 17% of faculty commute by bike which is very impressive considering those are almost exclusively choice riders.
http://www.washington.edu/facilities/transportation/commuterservices/upass/reports
Washington State has a Commute Trip Reduction law that sites with over 100 employee must keep the number of peak SOV trips under 60% of employees, but they can implement whatever programs they want to meet the requirement. Microsoft runs its own minibus system, for example. The UW UPASS program has been particularly successful since they control all parking on campus so they've used the pricing option. They've also heavily invested in bike infrastructure. Something like 17% of faculty commute by bike which is very impressive considering those are almost exclusively choice riders.
http://www.washington.edu/facilities/transportation/commuterservices/upass/reports
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