City Planning 101 – Transportation Benefits

If you’re a regular reader of Livable Buckhead’s blogs you’ve heard us talk about how employers wield a great deal of influence shaping healthy lifestyles through benefits packages. Your Human Resources department likely offers programs for smoking cessation and incentives for exercise. But if your health benefits don’t extend to commuter benefits, there’s a lot more you can be doing. Your employees’ commutes account for a large part of the physical activity they could be doing every day, and even commutes that involve public transit provide most employees with the recommended half hour of physical activity that many insurance plans consider the minimum for healthy living. If your workplace is well situated for employees to take transit, there’s a great deal of insurance plan savings that your office could stand to reap, but often people need the proper nudging to make healthy choices, even if they aren’t quite as convenient.

Here are some things your organization might do to encourage active commuting:

Set up benefits to reward good choices 
Your company benefits are a good reflection of your values, and where you apply your dollars is where you’ll see change. Make sure your benefits dollars are sending the right message. Livable Buckhead can help align those goals with programs like TRAN$AVE which reduces the cost of unlimited MARTA passes provided by employers. Employees who elect to take transit can also save themselves and their employers vast sums by foregoing costly monthly parking passes. For example, say parking passes cost $150/mo and MARTA passes cost $76/mo with TRAN$AVE. It makes sense to set your company subsidy at $76. Thus transit riders, who consume no parking and spare the Earth, commute for essentially free. Drivers save money too, but bear a share of the costs and the company provides the same subsidy to everyone. Consider a parking cash-out program for cyclists and walkers whose commutes are already free and clean.

Make sure high quality bike parking is available
Indoor is best, covered and secured will do. Study’s show that the most dedicated cyclists have a strong preference for good quality bike racks. The absence of an acceptable bike parking facility may make or break someone’s decision to bike to work. After all, a cyclist’s bike is analogous to a driver’s car, and they won’t leave it just anywhere.

“In the same way that an urban business would never clear out a muddy field around their building and declare that they’ve provided a parking lot for drivers, installing low-quality bike parking can often times be worse than installing nothing at all.” Strong Towns

Nearby amenities like showers/changing rooms as well as the availability of power outlets for eBike charging are also major pluses. Commercial property managers are increasingly finding it easy to dovetail those facilities with the fitness centers that many tenants demand.

Provide ‘Primo’ Carpool Parking
On the theme of giving clean commuters priority – the best parking spaces should be reserved for the fullest cars. A car with 2 passengers is effectively doubling its gas mileage. This is an easy, cheap way to green your workplace for the cost of some paint and signage. Your parking technology vendor may have tools to validate and reward those carpools too!