In Search of a City: Reliable Employees Ride Transit
Recent snow storms showed that employees who commute by bus can be more reliable than employees who drive. Last Tuesday, I had to advise my own staff about whether to come to work on Wednesday in a level 2 snow emergency. Because driving is discouraged during a level 2 emergency, I notified employees who drive to work that they could stay home on Wednesday. Employees who take transit had no such excuse. I required them to come to the office.
The experience got me thinking more about the logic of company policies toward parking and transit. Employee parking benefits are common, but transit benefits are not. Some companies pay $85 to $160 per month for an employee to park at commercial garages or lots. Others build and maintain their own parking facilities and offer “free” parking to employees.
Both options are expensive and create an artificial demand for parking, unless companies also offer transit benefits. Parking benefits can drive up the cost of doing business downtown because bus passes are generally less expensive than parking. Given a choice, many employees will choose to take transit if free passes are offered as an alternative to free parking.
Tags: Capital Crossroads Special Improvement District, columbus, Downtown, Downtown Columbus, Parking, transit, Transportation
February 16th, 2010 at 10:22 am
Cleve, I know you support transit, but requiring your transit-using staff to show up while giving a day off to staffers who drive will not encourage transit use. To the contrary, your policy says “drive a car, get a free day off!” For snow events minor enough that they are not Level 2 emergencies, I agree, the bus is a more reliable way to get to work. But if Level 2 means stay off the roads unless necessary, requiring transit-using staffers to get on a bus and risk a bus/car collission while permitting car drivers to remain safely at home doesn’t seem to promote the intent of the Level 2 warning: stay off the roads unless you have to.
I hope you at least bought your transit-using staff lunch, or had an official office snowball fight.
Eric M.
February 16th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
Agree with Eric. That wasn’t a very nice thing to do at all.
February 22nd, 2010 at 1:40 pm
I agree that there should be incentives for riding the bus or biking to work (I’m the only one at my workplace who commutes by bike). Now enforcing something like making bus riding employees show up during really bad weather probably isn’t a good policy like the other posters pointed out. Not only would it be a headache to see who is close to a COTA line, but if it’s possible to get there without driving or if it’s dangerous to walk there or if the particular line is dependable, etc, especially for a large company. Would employees near a certain distance of a park & ride have to show up while others don’t? What about those who don’t own their own car, but have someone else that drives them? At my workplace it was treated like any other day and the office was open. How you were getting there was up to you, unless you wanted to call in “sick”, which a couple of people did. I took the bus.