Reduce Transportation Impacts

The following excerpt is from IREM’s publication, A Practical Guide to Green Real Estate Management (IREM © 2009): 

Look outside your buildings for another major area of environmental impact—transportation to and from them. Fortunately, the things that you can do to cut back on these impacts will also save money and improve building occupants’ health at the same time. Share these ideas with your tenants and help implement them across your portfolio, but also integrate alternative transportation options into your own company’s practices. 

• Carefully consider whether an in-person meeting or a property visit is really necessary, or whether you can accomplish the same goals without traveling via Web-based conferences, video conferencing, digital pictures and teleconferencing. When you can either pay hundreds of dollars for a business trip or little to nothing for a Web conference, the choice is easy! Give WebEx conferencing services a try. 
• If travel is unavoidable, consider purchasing carbon offsets for your trips. Try the Carbon Fund, TerraPass, or the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. To make it even easier for you, many airlines, car rental agencies and other travel organizations now offer carbon offsets at the point of sale. 
• Find as many products and materials as possible at local and regional stores, rather than large national chains or far-away distribution centers, to reduce the cost and environmental impact of transporting materials over long distances. 
• Provide preferred parking for low-emitting or fuel-efficient vehicles, such as hybrids, and for employees who carpool to and from work. This can come in either the form of discounted parking passes or spaces nearest the building entrance. 
• Provide a Web-based carpool sign-up where building occupants can arrange rides with each other. In addition, place a clearly marked, widely visible ride-share board in the lobby or other high-foot-traffic area to increase awareness of this opportunity. Offer an “emergency ride home” program to assist carpoolers in a jam. The Best Workplaces for Commuters program provides tools and resources to help you with emergency ride home programs and other alternative commuting strategies. 
• Influence your building owners to install bicycle racks or storage facilities, along with showers and changing rooms for employees to use. You might also consider providing guest passes to nearby fitness centers, where office employees can shower after biking to work. Think about giving some incentives to employees or residents to purchase bicycles for daily commuting—for example, subsidize 10 percent of the purchase cost. This could lessen the congestion and the exhaust from an overly-crowded garage. 
• In metro areas with convenient public transportation systems, offer subsidized transit passes or raffle off free transit passes. If a property is not within walking distance of a transportation stop, consider providing occupants with a private shuttle to the nearest stop or station. 
• Contact Zipcar and inquire whether the building location is a good candidate for a shared vehicle. If the project is located in a metro area with reasonable demand for shared vehicles, Zipcar will typically provide a vehicle and administer the vehicle reservation program for free; all the property needs to do is designate a parking space for the Zipcar.