While teleworking is here to stay for more Americans than ever, most workers — and especially those with lower incomes — will still be required to physically go to their place of work.
However, we need to stop driving to get there.
To ensure that drive-alone commuting ceases to be the dominant commuter mode, we must demand better commuter benefits from our bosses, and our employers must demand better transit and active mode infrastructure from public agencies. But first, workers must be aware of what we can ask for, and why it is in the best interest of our employers to provide it.
In 2017, the transportation sector represented 42% of Multnomah County’s local emissions, or slightly more than the commercial and residential sectors combined. Much of this total is the product of Portlanders driving their own cars to work every morning and home every evening.
That’s because for many Portlanders, driving to work is not a choice but a necessity born out of a sprawled, decentralized job market; transit designed as a last resort mode; and employers who have historically not cared about how employees get to work so long as they do.
Unfortunately, public policies that could reshape this setup are lagging behind. At the moment, the primary statewide regulatory lever pushing employers to lower their single-occupancy vehicle rates is the Department of Environmental Quality’s Employee Commute Options, or ECO, program, which requires employers with more than 100 employees at one worksite to provide “commute options that have the potential to reduce employee commute auto trips by 10% within three years of its baseline survey.” However, failure to achieve a 10% reduction is not a violation so long as the employer makes a “good faith effort.”
Jenny Cadigan, the program manager at Oregon Health & Science University’s transportation and parking department, said this regulation lacks teeth in the form of a “real penalty” for not lowering an employer’s single-occupancy driving rates.
This is a problem, and more regulation is needed, but luckily regulation is not the only thing causing employers to rethink commuter habits. Luckier still, employees could hold another lever to reduce single-occupancy vehicle rates if they only knew to look for it.
As it turns out, drive-alone commuting is not just costly for workers (who must pay to own, store and maintain a car), agencies (which must maintain an underfunded road network overburdened by those cars) and future generations (who will wonder why we sacrificed our planet to maintain this expensive, dangerous and unpleasant way of commuting when so many other options were available). This setup is also costly for large employers, who often have to build and maintain their own parking supply along with dealing with other negative externalities associated with widespread drive-alone commuting, such as the adverse health effects it has on their employees.
Some of the largest employers in the Portland metro region have caught on that a system in which the substantial majority of employees commute by single-occupancy vehicles is not working for anybody, and they have formed transportation demand management, or TDM, teams or have started offering commuter benefits to address it. These employers are spread across the region and include OHSU, Portland State University, Port of Portland, Adidas, Daimler and Providence Portland Medical Center.
At its most basic, TDM is about managing the demand for commuter modes — from cars to transit and biking — to better match the supply of parking spaces an employer can provide. The fewer people who drive to work, the less strain they put on parking, which can cost more than $21,000 per space to build in Portland.
Employers have two core strategies to reduce single-occupancy vehicle commuter rates: make driving less appealing by eliminating car subsidies like free parking, and make it more appealing to get to work another way by offering other commuter benefits. These benefits might include things like subsidized transit passes, cash for a new bike or e-scooter, onsite showers for active commuters or teleworking options.
Really want to start a revolution? Ask your employer to pay you to walk or bike to work.
Although many companies find that without daily parking fees, employees are unlikely to take advantage of these benefits right away. A few of the region’s biggest employers, including Nike and OHSU, have been offering some form of benefits for decades for workers who don’t commute in single-occupancy vehicles. Even before the pandemic, some of these companies, including Daimler, were redeveloping their teleworking policies to allow for a more flexible work-life balance and to boost productivity.
While there are many altruistic reasons to try to limit the number of employees driving to your office, a lot of what is driving TDM strategies among really big employers is common-sense economics.
Say you’re running a university and hospital with 17,000 employees, do you really want to commit 180 square feet of real estate per employee, or 70 acres in total (and that doesn’t include the driving lanes between parking spaces), to storage for cars that are only there part of the day? Or do you want to invest that real estate, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would cost you to build and maintain thousands of parking spaces, in a new wing of beds or a new MRI machine or lab facilities?
This is the question that OHSU started asking decades ago. Out of all the major employers in the region, OHSU is in a uniquely bad location for car commuting. While the complex of towers perched atop Marquam Hill is less than half a mile from Interstate 5, the slender piece of real estate it sits on leaves little room for parking. This led the hospital to create its TDM office way back in the 1980s.
Since then, OHSU’s list of commuter benefits has expanded to become among the most robust in the region. Benefits include subsidized transit passes, a free shuttle connecting the campus to downtown, guaranteed rides home via Lyft in case of emergency, carpool reimbursements, a bike valet, subsidized access to an aerial tram, even cold hard cash for employees who walk or bike to work.
And that isn’t the whole list. As a result of these offerings and, critically, the introduction of daily parking fees, which encourage employees to rethink their commute habits, OHSU dropped its drive-alone rate to 40% in 2018, compared to 59% for Portland as a whole.
OHSU has proved that the right motivation (in this case, limited space for parking 40 years ago) can lead to real reductions in drive-alone commuting while benefiting employees, who now have a bigger list of comparable commute options, and benefiting the employer, which can continue to grow without worrying as much about limited parking supply.
Not every employer is dealing with a parking crunch like OHSU was in the 1980s, though, nor is every employer equally concerned about how their company contributes to climate change. But the more we recognize what drive-alone commuting is costing all of us, including our employers, and become aware of what kind of commuter benefits are possible, the easier it will be for us to advocate for ourselves and become the motivation our bosses need.
Most Americans are used to taking into account benefits when they look for work. Consider how much of our lives are spent commuting, how much it costs to own a car (more than $8,000 a year on average in Portland), and the role cars play in climate change. If your employer does not offer any alternatives, you can be a part of the change humanity needs by simply asking, “Why not?”
Here are a few other benefits to ask for: secure bike racks and repair stations inside your building, Biketown and/or scooter share passes (some scooter shares will install a hub at your worksite for free if the conditions are right), reimbursements for carpooling, shuttle services, vanpool services, guaranteed rides home for emergencies, better teleworking options that include hybrid schedules, subsidized car share accounts, gift certificates for active wear, company-owned bikes or e-mobility devices and bike classes.
In recent years, PSU has been boosting its active-transportation benefit package, including more bike racks, free Biketown rides for students and a free bike repair station, among other benefits. TDM manager Clint Culpepper described active commuter benefits as “the most cost effective” the university offers — especially when compared to the cost-effectiveness of car parks.
However, despite the thrilling promise of e-bikes and teleworking, new technology and active modes should not overshadow the importance of public transit, the second-most popular commute mode in the region pre-pandemic, representing 12% of the mode share in 2019. Many of these riders were able to use our transit system at reduced rates thanks to 1,200 employers purchasing passes for them through one of TriMet’s three Transit Pass Programs for Employers, which include tax incentives. Post-pandemic, transit must once again become a leading alternative to driving alone to work.
Some employers may point out that while transit is an excellent alternative to driving alone in theory, transit access is not universal and service not always dependable, introducing equity concerns.
If your employer is concerned about this, ask what they are doing to support employees who are already using transit and to improve transit access and service to your work location.
If your work location is in Washington County, Gresham, the Lloyd District, South Waterfront or Slabtown, ask your employer if they have considered partnering with your local transportation management association, as these nonprofit organizations can help businesses collectively work together to improve transportation services in their community.
If transit access to your work location is lacking, your employer should call TriMet at 503-238-7433 and ask why.
Really want to start a revolution? Ask your employer to pay you to walk or bike to work. If they balk, point out the true cost of the parking they maintain, and ask them if they have ever calculated how much they could save if there was just a little more incentive to commute by bike or on foot. OHSU realized that it is worth it to provide its active commuters $1.50 per trip.
If you work at a major employer in the region, there is a strong chance that you already have access to some of these benefits. Along with the employers already mentioned, Adidas, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Columbia Sportswear, Intel and Providence Health System all offer some form of commuter benefits for employees or at least mention them on their websites. Some of these employers, like OHSU and Port of Portland, have actively worked with local agencies to improve transit access to their worksite.
Meanwhile, neither Boeing nor Precision Castparts, which before the pandemic employed thousands in manufacturing positions in different parts of the Portland area, list any commuter benefits on their website. (Neither company responded to requests for comment in time for this column).
Too often, benefits are piecemeal and are not backed up by a TDM strategy with a stated single-occupancy vehicle rate target. Employers can and must do more with emissions reduction as a stated goal that comes with the additional benefits of saving money on parking, attracting more job applicants, creating a less-stressed and healthier workforce, and being a better neighbor in their respective communities.
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