While telecommuting is an obvious way that businesses can ease their employees’ travel woes, it’s just not an option for companies with face-to-face and interactive staffing needs.

So, firms are increasingly assisting with the cost, inconvenience and stress of getting to work by facilitating carpools, shuttles, cycling, walking and public transit.

Many are aided by Smart Commute, a program of Metrolinx and the municipalities in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, which helps employers implement solutions to ease gridlock.

“We don’t sense much reluctance or hesitance in becoming part of this program, because the benefits are very clear,” said Smart Commute manager Becky Upfold.

“The savings are avoided costs of (building) extra parking; or, in some cases, actually selling car parking spaces, because they no longer need them.”

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Intangible benefits are “increased engagement and satisfaction from their staff,” she added. “It helps with staff retention which in the long run saves businesses money.”

More than 300 GTHA companies — representing 700,000 commuters — are designated Smart Commute workplaces.

Depending on location, employer enrollment costs vary, from no cost, to say, $2 per employee, for Smart Commute to help set up a car pool system or provide access to discounted transit passes.

The organization recently handed out its seventh annual Smart Commute Awards to companies leading the charge to sustainable commuting

Among this year’s 11 winners is the Mississauga headquarters of global engineering consultancy Hatch Ltd. The company was similarly recognized in 2011 and 2007, the year it signed on with Smart Commute.

“At the time, it was a parking shortage,” said engineer Andrew Tohn a co-ordinator of Hatch’s Commuting Initiatives Team.

“We’d gone through a growth period and the parking lot became too small for our needs; so we looked at alternative methods to try to reduce single occupant drivers.

“We had a number of drivers coming in from downtown Toronto that were not far from each other and yet they were taking their own vehicles.”

The company has 1,200 people operating out of three buildings in the Sheridan Science and Technology Park at QEW/Winston Churchill Blvd.

Hatch rewards employees who carpool ($5 per day) and cycle ($2 per day) to work. The program, which saw the conversion of coveted, near-the-entrance parking spots to car pool-only, has resulted in a 16 per cent reduction in single occupancy vehicle travel since 2008.

A bike share initiative, which didn’t survive the two-year trial, was a lesson demonstrating that solutions need to be tailor-made, said Tohn.

“We purchased a small fleet of bicycles and equipment, helmets, racks, etc. and offered our employees the opportunity to rent the bikes out, or just sign out the bicycles to use them to go between offices within a kilometre or two of each other; rather than an employee taking their car and driving and then having trouble finding a parking spot,” he explained.

“(But) a number of employees found that in the time it took to go to reception to sign out a key, then go to the bike storage racks and unlock a bicycle, the whole process took the same amount of time as simply walking to the destination office.”

On the other hand, with the Martin Goodman Trail nearby, cycling seems ideal for the staff at Beach-based ad agency Top Drawer Creative Inc.

With a self-described “eco nerd,” CEO Howard Chang, at the helm, the company was thinking sustainably long before it joined Smart Commute in 2011.

Seven years earlier, then based in Leslieville, the firm implemented a bike-to-work program .

“Our thinking was: ‘If we could just convert some of these young, urban commuters from driving their cars, to either taking transit, or riding their bicycles we could make some kind of an impact; not just from a pollution, congestion, point of view, but from a quality of life (point of view); get our people outside more, exercising more, walking more, riding more,” said Chang.

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“We started subsidizing our employees by paying them to ride their bikes to work. It was very modest in the beginning, like $2 a day. We built showers in our workplace; we built indoor bike storage; we brought in the City of Toronto to do bike maintenance and bike safety workshops.”

With the bike subsidy now up to $5 a day, about 40 per cent of employees cycle to the Queen St. E.-Victoria Park Ave. offices. For meetings where cycling or public transit is not an option, staff carpool in hybrid vehicles. The result at the 38-person operation is a 70 per cent reduction in car trips over the last five years.

“Maybe I spend $30,000-$40,000 on these programs,” Chang said. “It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the net-net benefit. We have a number of employees in here that have significantly changed their lifestyles around heath and wellbeing because of the program.

“It improves productivity, but most importantly, it improves morale. We’re in the advertising business; it’s a stressful business. It’s deadlines and clients wanting this and that; and when my people ride their bikes home, or walk home, and some of them actually jog home, they feel invigorated, relaxed and get a little bit of that mental break.”

Employers seem to have more success if they treat their staff’s travel needs holistically.

At York University, for example, registered carpoolers can access Smart Commute’s Emergency Ride Home program.

“Say I’m carpooling and my son needs to be picked up from daycare because suddenly he’s sick, or he’s been injured, and I can’t get there because of my carpool, the four of them have to stay here,” outlined Nicole Arsenault, the school’s manager of Transportation & Student Services.

“They will give you a taxi voucher, or up to a certain amount for a car rental to get home. That gets rid of the ‘What if I have to leave?’ Or, ‘An emergency happens and I have to stay later on campus?’ It’s an incentive to try sustainable transportation.”

With 10,000 employees and 55,000 students descending daily on the massive Keele St-Steeles Ave. property, it’s no surprise that the university was a founding member of Smart Commute which evolved from the Black Creek Regional Transportation Management Association.

At the turn of the century, 70 per cent of the population drove by themselves to York.

“The university could no longer build more parking because we didn’t have the land and obviously our priority is academics,” said Arsenault.

A commitment to finding options has been fruitful. The university now accommodates 78 carpools (a 95 per cent increase over 2012); 60 bike racks; two secure bike cages; 16 bus routes; shuttles to the York University Go Station; 16 Zipcars; and has consequently reduced parking from 12,000 to 9,000 spots.

“Today, 80 per cent of our community actually comes in sustainable means of transportation,” said Arsenault. “So we have done more than the reverse in terms of getting people out of their cars.”

The positives for the environment, workers and business are immeasurable.

“A big benefit of the carpooling program is that it creates links between employees that otherwise wouldn’t have a reason to have a link,” said Tohn from Hatch which has spent about $500,000 on commuter improvements since 2007.

“We’ll have employees from our mining and metals sector commuting with employees from energy, for example; those two employees don’t usually have any reason to associate at the office, because they’re in completely different industries. It creates links and builds relationships outside of normal work environment.”

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