My employer is planning a new manufacturing plant. I work with some of the people designing it. They currently don’t have any plans to hook up to public transit, though there’s a commuter train station 3 miles away. It takes 20min to bike between them or 40min currently to take a bus. The area it’s in is extremely car centric. They’re looking at making an enormous multi level underground parking garage.
How can I encourage them to be more public transit friendly? Maybe a shuttle bus directly from the station to the plant? Looks like that would be about 10min if it runs regularly.
The company doesn’t really care about the environment or the health of the community, so I can’t really give those arguments. The designers said they had looked at shuttle busses before, but it was way too expensive, so they pushed the cost onto the employee.
Could I pitch it as a money save vs building the parking? Or that you’d open up opportunities for more worker applications? Or that it would help traffic jams? Are there any academic papers I could reference about the equilibrium of car driving vs public transit?
How can I argue for public transit in terms the company cares about?
the plant would never pay for a shuttle bus because that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. It’s easier to hire people that don’t require it.
Maybe lobby the local government to change the route of local buses to be there could be easier, but that might be difficult. When I went to high school, the local transit company suddenly changed the timetable to start the bus 5 mins before the end of classes, with the next one after 45 mins. Everyone complained, but they didn’t budge, that bus couldn’t start 5 minutes later because reasons. The solution was that everyone bought a gas-powered scooter and went to school with that, because waiting 45 minutes after school for the bus is unacceptable for any teenager