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Weekly UpdatesFederal, state and local governments over the past fifteen years have either required or cajoled large employers in several metropolitan areas to reduce employee commute trips. Local growth management or trip reduction ordinances, mandates by the California South Coast Air Quality Management District's (SCAQMD) Regulation XV (Rule 1501), and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (CAAA) provided the legal basis. CAAA authorized the most sweeping requirements, identifying employees commuting alone as polluters, but placing the burden to change commuting behavior on employers. (1) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandated that those areas across the country that greatly exceed federal standards for ground level ozone (severe ozone nonattainment areas) reduce automobile emissions through Employee Commute Options/Employer Trip Reduction (ECO/ETR) programs. ECO/ETR programs in such areas compelled major employers to affect how their employees commute to work, when they work and where they work. (2)
A number of states with severe nonattainment areas, at the behest of business interests, resisted the implementation of mandatory ECO/ETR programs in the early 1990s. (3) The EPA then ceded to the states the enforcement of ECO/ETR and requested that employers make "a good faith effort" to meet higher vehicle occupancy targets.
Despite EPA's "flexibility," employer opposition caused several states to suspend their programs. Pennsylvania suspended its ETR program in February 1995. Maryland suspended its ECO program in May 1995, citing the costs to employers of reducing employee trips. (4) Delaware and New Jersey modified their programs and proceeded more flexibly. Federal legislation in late 1995 allowed states to implement ECO/ETR programs on a voluntary basis. California, the early laboratory for such programs, repealed Rule 1501 in December 1995, but maintains Rule 2202, which gives large employers various options to reduce vehicle trips.
The often cited reasons for making ECO/ETR programs voluntary are the programs' negligible impacts on air quality and high costs to employers. While the air quality impacts may indeed be small, it would seem that the costs to employers would depend on the measures that are implemented. What appears not to have been considered at all is the potential costs to employees. One may suggest that since ECO/ETR is generally voluntary, these issues are moot; yet, voluntary ECO/ETR programs for congestion management and air quality mitigation purposes continue to affect employers and employees.
The objective of this article is to discern the effectiveness of some common employer trip reduction measures and the equity impacts of those measures on employees. Effectiveness is defined as reduction in single occupant vehicle use by employees compared to employer costs, while equity refers to the distribution of costs and other burdens among employees. The study area consists of two severe ozone nonattainment areas: Baltimore and Philadelphia. These two areas were chosen as geographically and otherwise comparable study areas for a larger EPA funded study of ECO/ETR impacts. The methodology consists of a review of the literature and analysis of surveys of employees in the two areas.
Study Area
The Philadelphia Nonattainment Area has at its center the Delaware Valley Region of Pennsylvania and New Jersey (DVR). The DVR consists of the Cities of Philadelphia and Camden and surrounding suburban Pennsylvania and New Jersey counties; population in 2000 was 5,387,407. The other counties in the nonattainment area, New Castle and Kent, Delaware; Cecil, Maryland; and Salem and Cumberland, New Jersey; bound the DVR on the south. According to a study of journey-to-work trends, the DVR is a mature urban region that is growing slowly in population and employment and, as is typical of other metropolitan areas, continues to decentralize. (5) The shift in workers and jobs in the DVR has resulted in significant changes in commuting patterns over the 1980 to 1990 period. In 1990 approximately 59 percent of workers in the region traveled from suburban residence to suburban job. The number of workers reverse commuting from Philadelphia increased by 44 percent to the Pennsylvania suburbs and by 59 percent to the New Jersey suburbs. Workers commuting to jobs outside the region increased by 50 percent.
According to Census of Population data, over the period 1980 to 1990 the use of single occupant vehicles increased greatly and ride-sharing declined. The percentage of workers driving alone increased from 59.4 percent to 68 percent. The use of carpools or vanpools declined from 18 percent to 12 percent. Public transportation use declined from 13.6 percent to 11 percent. This trend continued, but slowed somewhat, between 1990 and 2000. Driving alone increased to 70.4 percent, while car/vanpools and public transportation declined to 9.9 percent and 9.4 percent, respectively.
The Baltimore Nonattainment Area consists of the Baltimore Metropolitan Area, essentially the City of Baltimore and surrounding suburban counties; population in 2000 was 2,512,431. The area has experienced growth in population and employment, but a decentralization of growth. The realignment of labor and jobs over the metropolitan area's geography and the concentration of development in suburban activity centers have fundamentally influenced commuting patterns. Between 1980 and 1990 the number of workers in the metropolitan area commuting from suburb-to-suburb increased by 41.7 percent, while the number commuting from suburb-to-city declined by 9.5 percent. (6) Because of the increase in workers but slight decline in jobs in Baltimore City during the 1980s, city-to-suburb commuting experienced the largest relative increase of 48.0 percent. The "reverse commute" has become a significant component of the commuting pattern.
According to Census data, the percentage of workers in the metropolitan area driving alone grew from 59.8 percent to 70.8 percent between 1980 and 1990, while the percentage of commuters in car/vanpools declined from 22.3 percent to only 14.1 percent. Users of transit declined from 10.0 percent to 7.8 percent of all commuters. The Baltimore Area trend between 1990 and 2000 was similar to that of DVR. Driving alone increased to 74.7 percent, while car/vanpools and public transportation declined to 12.0 percent and 6.2 percent, respectively.
Literature on Employer Trip Reduction Measures
Research has indicated that with sufficiently strong incentives/disincentives, travel behavior regarding mode choice can be changed. (7) Employer parking strategies, i.e., parking surcharges and subsidized parking for ride-sharers, are widely acknowledged to be among the most effective at promoting ride-sharing. (8) Some of the early research on the results of SCAQMD's Regulation 15 found that the most "popular" incentives among employers, such as ride-share matching and transit information, caused very minor reductions in single occupant vehicle trips. (9) In the late 1980s and early 1990s COMSIS, Inc., a transportation consulting firm, undertook evaluations of employer trip reduction measures and their cost effectiveness. (10) A total of 22 cases were analyzed in terms of percent of vehicle trip reduction, employer costs and savings both direct and indirect, and cost effectiveness, i.e., net cost per trip reduced.
Site factors were generally not important to reducing trips. Smaller firms in general had higher trip reductions, but area density, flexible work hours and marketing and promotion had little relative importance. Whether the trip reduction measure was legally mandated or voluntary was not important in explaining trip reduction, a finding confirmed recently by Kneisel. (11) Level of emphasis on parking charges and restrictions and financial incentives toward ride-sharing and transit use were associated with trip reduction levels. The presence of transit, vanpooling, and carpooling added to trip reduction.
In general those employers that utilized financial incentives/disincentives were able to achieve trip reductions of 3.7 percent to 47.9 percent. They were also able to achieve these reductions more cost effectively. Employers that charged employees for parking earned net revenues and cost savings. Revenues from parking charges and employer cost savings per trip, i.e., parking facility costs avoided as a result of less parking space required, outweighed costs of incentives and administration.
Modest "support" programs on the other hand, such as ride-share matching, transit promotion and marketing, have an upper limit of about 5 percent trip reduction, while incurring significant expenses for employers. (12) Yet, the great majority of employers have relied on these modest support programs.
A modeling effort by Hillsman et al. focused on the distributional impacts of trip reduction programs on transportation networks. (13) Using a required biennial survey of large employers with ETR programs in the Seattle Region, the researchers found that between 1993 and 1999, surveyed employees reduced single occupant vehicle commuting from 74.5 to 68.4 percent. The 1999 survey results were then used in a four-step modeling process, which estimated a reduction in vehicle-trips of less than one percent, an amount that is small by any measure. However, the researchers found that the reduction was distributed disproportionally, so that some portions of Interstate Highway 5, for example, exhibited the equivalent of an additional half lane of capacity. This "half lane of capacity" was achieved at a cost, incurred by employers, that is much less than that of physically expanding the capacity.
Modeling of ECO/ETR Impacts in the Study Area
The designation of a Philadelphia Nonattainment Area prompted the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission with COMSIS to analyze and model alternative trip reduction strategies or test scenarios. (14) The analysis focused on measures that could achieve a substantial emissions reduction by 1996, the year by which a 15 percent reduction in Volatile Organic Compounds were to be achieved. The analysis also focused on the costs and cost effectiveness of the measures.
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