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?
Given how much underground parking costs to construct, that’s the argument with the most leverage I think.
I somehow doubt that a few shuttle buses a day are more expensive than underground construction amortised over a decades or two. Especially not if that company intends to grow. (Go ask them how much growth they want to see in the company and how many more underground parking garages they plan to build to match.)
They’d likely not care. There’s likely a “If you don’t want to earn it, you don’t deserve it.” mindset at the decision level here; if you don’t want to drive your car 2h every day to get here, you don’t deserve to work here.
Given you said that they don’t GAF about the health of the community, I doubt they’d care about the community’s traffic jams.