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It’s hot. It’s breezy. It’s an open road. This is the world of a commute by bike. I’ve been trying to improve my commute to the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), where I am a fellow, after working for years from a home office. I prefer biking the 10 miles to the office, most of it on a bike path, to driving any day. Reducing the number of people that drive to work offers a number of benefits beyond my improved quality of life—less pollution, less congestion, less parking real estate—so how have businesses, cities, and policies made it happen?
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Last week in The Guardian I wrote about how integrating economics, social behavior, and environmental sustainability trends, such as the desire for companies to move closer to public transit and city centers, can improve policy development to help get people to stop driving.
Here’s how the story begins:
Imagine that, starting tomorrow, half your company’s employees stopped driving to work. The benefits would start accruing almost immediately: less pollution, less real estate needed for parking spaces, improved quality of life, and much more. So how do companies do it and, given all these benefits, why aren’t more jumping onboard?
Google—which this week rebranded itself as Alphabet—may not have been the first company to offer shuttles to its employees, but the size and growth of its shuttle program have made it the most prominent, for better or for worse.
The company started its own bus service in 2004 to shuttle roughly 150 employees from their San Francisco homes to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Today, 6,400 of Alphabet’s 11,000 Bay Area employees use the corporate fleet of 140 biodiesel-fueled buses to get to work each day. While the buses have been met with protests since 2013 for fuelling gentrification in the form of skyrocketing housing costs, the buses have succeeded in keeping cars off the road.
Private busing is not an option for most companies, but a variety of tools—from social media to long term planning—can reduce the number of single-driver cars employees put on the road, according to Susan Hunt Stevens, the founder and chief executive of WeSpire, a 35-person tech firm in Boston that offers an interactive, web-based platform to help companies motivate employees to change their habits, get onboard with company sustainability goals, and measure outcomes. Commuting programs are among the most sought-after initiatives, she said.
For the article, I talked to Gerrit-Jan Knaap, professor and director the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland, who is also a co-principal investigator at SESYNC and has been developing a model for the region covering Baltimore to Washington DC to understand how behavior preferences and state policies will impact the future trends in development, transportation, land use and the environment.
Knaap explained that:
“forecasting sustainable development involves tracking the interplay of large scale phenomena. Factoring in regional development, gas prices, greenhouse gas incentives, preferences for where millennials live, transportation choices and where highways get built are all helpful in deciding where to locate businesses and where future infrastructure development may fall short.”
You can read the rest of the story here.
Lisa Palmer is a fellow for socio-environmental understanding at SESYNC and a journalist.
The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, funded through an award to the University of Maryland from the National Science Foundation, is a research center dedicated to accelerating scientific discovery at the interface of human and ecological systems. Visit us online at www.sesync.org and follow us on Twitter @SESYNC.
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