Priced Parking

I don't have any helpful experience to share but please post updates of this effort!

Leslie Coolidge
United States

Have your tried getting in touch with employers in areas with trip reduction ordinances? Someone must have tried priced parking there...although the employer resistance issue would be lower with such regulations, they may be better able to point you to useful resources on pricing specifically. If you weren't aware, a list of ordinances around the country (Mass and Maryland are/are closest to the northeast; other states on the Atlantic seaboard as well).

http://www.nctr.usf.edu/clearinghouse/tro/trolist.htm

Elaine Wang
Climate and Environmental Programs
Institute for Sustainable Communities
United States
http://www.iscvt.org

I haven't got any experience to share with you, but hopefully a couple of ideas to investigate to reduce negative feedback and encourage mode-shift and car pooling.

Why not have a car pool register coordinated within your organisation, so people can find car pool partners (and you can monitor the uptake)

What about offering a free shuttle bus from the closest train station at peak times to encourage train commuting (often it's just that disconnect between the station and the workplace that becomes the final barrier to people catching the train).

Are you providing more bike storage, shower & locker facilities to encourage cycling and walking to work.

Perhaps give away some public transport tickets as an incentive to get people to try the train, bus, whatever public transport you have nearby. If they don't have to pay for a ticket they may be more likely to try it. We recently ran an event and sent all participants a public transport ticket prior to the event - all but one participant (out of 19) used the ticket and many would normally have driven (it was an event for fleet managers).

Maybe look at options for staff to salary sacrifice public transport tickets as well, so the cost of public transport comes out of pre-tax salary and can reduce employees' tax bills. It's a good incentive to stop driving their private car to the workplace as maintenance costs, petrol and now parking fees are all incurred post-tax.

Merryn Coutts
Greenfleet
Australia
www.greenfleet.com.au

@Lesile
Sure, I will keep everyone updated about any developments. Thank you.

@Elaine
Thank you for the web link, it's a great resource and I'll reach out to employers in the area you mentioned. We've reached out to a few employers elsewherer, but the possible models we are introduced would belong more-so-often to compact urban set-up where parking capacity is a constraint. Central Jersey in many cases, with some exceptions, has Parking Lots as huge as a few football grounds. :-)

@Merryn:
Merry, your suggestions are very insightful. We are already providing active assistance in setting up carpools and we assit the State DOT with its car/vanpool projects. Parking fees is being examined as one of the tools to increase mode-shift to carpooling.

It's exciting to know about your event where you gave out public transit tickets and the turn around was almost 100%. Also the pre-tax salary benefits is one thing that can incentivize mode-shift. I'm sure we could do these with our Pilot run.

Considering the fact that this is a Pilot run, more Bike lockers, showers etc.at this point would become cost intensive. But over a period of time, funds generated from the parking fees could be used to fund facilities development.

Jay Thakkar
Green Commute Coordinator
Greater Mercer TMA
United States