Employer Incentives Create a Shift Toward Car Pools

First-year efforts to entice Southern Californians away from commuting to their jobs alone are showing a “quite encouraging” shift to car-pooling, a study has found.

But researchers warn that employers will have to use bigger carrots and heavier sticks to continue making progress.

The study, by urban planning professors Martin Wachs of UCLA and Genevieve Giuliano of USC, gives the first glimpse of what options commuters prefer as the region embarks on the nation’s most innovative efforts to reduce pollution and congestion.

They found that commuters like switching to car pools more often than to any alternative, including buses, bicycles or working out of their homes.

Wachs and Giuliano studied changes in commuting habits noted during the first year of a strict regulation by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. The rule requires large companies to offer workers incentives to commute by bus, car pool, bicycle or other alternatives than driving alone.

Their research shows that 70.9% of employees of the 812 work sites studied continued to commute alone, despite ride-sharing inducements; this compares to 75.8% before the program. Meanwhile, car-pooling jumped to 18.7% from 13.5%, and bus ridership dipped to 3.9% from 4.2%. By county, 67% of the firms surveyed were in Los Angeles, 21% in Orange County, 7% in San Bernardino, and 4% in Riverside. Results on average were consistent from county to county, researchers said.

Wachs cautioned against reading too much into these first-year shifts. He said they reflect the fact that, in the first year of long-term changes, simple solutions are tried first. Car pools, he said, are the easiest alternative.

Because of their low cost and convenience, car pools will probably always be the most popular alternative to driving alone, Wachs said. But he added that other options, particularly public transit, will probably play a larger role as more train lines open, bus service improves and traffic congestion worsens.

Wachs said it is too early to determine whether the AQMD regulation is having a measurable effect on air quality or traffic. But the idea is to reduce the number of vehicles on the road--thereby cutting pollution and congestion--by increasing the average number of people in each vehicle.

Local transportation planners have said they expect the AQMD regulation to encourage people to use the new rail transit lines and expanded bus services expected to be available during the coming decade.

In the first year of the program, about two-thirds of the companies studied complied with the program by giving preferential parking to car pools, a virtually cost-free incentive. Forty-six percent of the companies offered to pay for part of their employees’ bus passes.

About the same percentage offered prize drawings to employees who stopped driving alone, or offered car poolers and bus riders “guaranteed rides home” if they had to work late or leave early. About 43% of the companies said they made showers and lockers available to employees who rode bicycles to work.

At the lower end of the scale, some companies offered free coffee and doughnuts to car-pool members. Only about 4% of the work sites sampled had withdrawn free employee parking as a way to force solo commuters out of their cars.

Cars driven by employees of the companies studied by Wachs and Giuliano carried an average of 1.23 people when the program started. The goal is to increase that to an average of 1.75 people for companies in central Los Angeles, 1.3 people in designated outlying areas and 1.5 people for areas in between.

After one year, Wachs and Giuliano found that average vehicle ridership had grown to 1.26. They said this was “statistically significant” in regard to the long-term goal of increasing the number of passengers per vehicle by 26%.

Still, Wachs predicted that employers will have to use more incentives.

“Doughnuts and coffee and prize drawings and one trip to Hawaii and all that are just not enough to shift more than a few percentage points,” he said. “To get more dramatic numbers, they are going to have to do more.”

Convenience and price drive commuters’ choices, just as they do in any market, Wachs said, so making commuting alternatives more convenient also makes them more attractive.

“It’s important that it be well designed . . . and reflective of a person’s actual travel pattern,” he said. “You can’t expect someone to have to wait 2 1/2 hours for a van and expect them to prefer that to using their own car. If you can, provide a car pool or a van pool that does pick up a worker right at their door and drops them off at home, and arrange it so they can take an earlier van or a later van” if they finish work early or stay late.

Management also must be flexible to accept bus riders who are occasionally late because of a missed connection or late bus, and they should make available company cars, shuttles or taxi vouchers to workers who might have to leave midday to care for a sick child or for other personal emergencies.

“Management example also leads to workers taking it seriously,” he said. “If management says: ‘Ride-sharing is important,’ but then all managers drive to work alone and have reserved (parking) spaces, all the workers see that. They’re turned off by it.”

Employees also see a bargain, and respond to it. That, said Wachs, is why so many commuters still drive alone to work.

“It’s popular to say that people have a love affair with their cars. But I’ve been reading about transportation and doing research on transportation for 25 years and I haven’t found any credible studies which can demonstrate that people are irrational,” he said. “Rather, I find that the choices most people make are rational.

“In most cases, it does take people longer (to commute) by transit. It does require you to wait outside. Buses are crowded, and they are ugly. There is high crime at transit stops and on buses. And employees are getting free parking from employers and they often have stops to make before they go to work and after they get off work.

“When you put all those things together, they are making rational choices in taking their cars,” Wachs said. “It saves time. It’s more convenient. It gives them more flexibility. So it’s not a love affair with the automobile, it’s rationality.”

For these reasons, Wachs and others who have studied transportation in Southern California have found, cars will continue to carry most commuters for decades to come.

But to keep the region from choking on its traffic--and the pollution it causes--as many people as possible should be lured from their cars by improving the alternatives and reducing subsidies given drivers.

Improvements already are on the way: rail transit lines being built by the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, additional bus routes scheduled for the Southern California Rapid Transit District, and commuter train service being organized by the Southern California Regional Rail Authority.

Reducing subsidies to automobiles is more problematical. For example, free parking is very popular with employees, as seen by vocal protests raised when it has been threatened at UCLA, City Hall and other employment centers.

Wachs and others, including Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), have recommended charging employees the market rate for parking, then rebating that amount in the form of a monthly “travel allowance” that they could spend as they wish.

Paying for parking would leave them as well off as they are now, Wachs said, but splitting the parking fee with a car-pool partner or buying a bus pass would let them put more money in their pocket, thus encouraging them to use those alternatives.

“I can’t think of any good reason why in our society it should be the normal practice for the employer to pay for the employee’s parking,” he said. “It’s antisocial. It increases the consumption of gasoline. It encourages people to drive during the most congested hours on the most congested facilities.”

Such a proposal would require an act of Congress because federal tax law requires taxation of travel allowances--but not free parking.

Parking costs are tax-deductible for employers, while travel allowances are tax-free only up to $21. Any larger allowance is taxable.

Wachs said Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento) has introduced legislation in Washington to change the tax code to permit tax-free travel allowances.

“The magnitude of the change (in commuting patterns) so far is so small I’d be reluctant to say it has had a substantial impact,” Wachs said. “However, it is in the right direction, and we need to do everything we can do to reduce traffic congestion and improve the air.”