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Workplace

Travel Planning

Your bottom line, one commute at a time

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Workplace Travel Planning

Your bottom line, one commute at a time

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The more your employees drive to work, the greater the hidden, long-term costs

that are passed on to your organization:

• Stressed out, sedentary employees increase health insurance claims and premiums

• Lateness and absenteeism due to health issues or traffic congestion

drag down productivity

• Corporate social responsibility claims can ring hollow

• Free parking is in reality a much larger expense than the organization accounts for,

since it induces people to drive to work when they might otherwise choose

healthier and more efficient options for commuting

Travel planning—policies that encourage and reward your people to leave their

cars at home—can save your organization substantial money and significantly

increase productivity. A travel plan employs such tactics as pre-tax transit

benefits, carpooling, leveraging the value of parking, and incentivizing active

transportation—biking and walking—into a strategy that fits your organization’s

specific needs.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE IF OUR PEOPLE DRIVE?

While it is a personal choice to drive, it is your organization’s business how

your people get to work because the more your employees drive, the more

you pay. In fact, the entire enterprise’s profitability is integrally connected

to employee travel habits—from healthcare costs to absenteeism, real estate

management to parking maintenance, not to mention a growing awareness of

corporate social responsibility.

You only need to look at the size of the subsidy of free parking to see how the

organizations that offer it affect the choices made by individual commuters.

Free parking is essentially a large cash benefit, often equaling more than

$1,000 per year—large enough that employees will accept the stress of

a difficult commute just to take advantage of it.

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HOW DO WE DEVELOP A TRAVEL PLAN?

A workplace travel plan is defined as a package of measures that an

employer puts in place to encourage and enable staff to travel to work more

sustainably and cost-effectively. Workplace travel plans may also address

other travel affecting the worksite, including business, visitor, customer

or patient travel, etc.

An organization looking to lower the amount of people driving to its physical

location must therefore enable and reward the following other modes of travel:

• Carpooling/vanpooling

• Public transit

• Bicycling and walking

• Telecommuting

• Flexible scheduling

Therefore, tactics may include:

• Progressively priced parking to encourage carpooling

• Parking space cash-outs (trading parking rights for cash value of the space)

• Pre-tax transit deductions and/or free, timely, and convenient shuttles to transit

• Convenient bike parking and/or changing facilities

• Flexible work schedules and telecommuting policies

• Tracking trips and rewarding miles not driven alone to work

Workplaces implement travel plans for many reasons: to have healthier

employees, to mitigate congestion, to make better use of their real estate, to be

leaders in sustainability or social responsibility, or even to lower attrition. All

of these reasons are borne of the desire to stay competitive and have a stronger

bottom line.

By making it convenient, practical, and even rewarding for employees to leave

their car at home, organizations can help employees save thousands of dollars

per year on automobile-related costs and experience a vastly improved work/

life balance, while the organization can save millions of dollars each year.

A glowing commuter-benefits program can be a boon for recruitment and

retention.