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Car pools, Zipcars, and designer bike racks
June 24, 2009
by Carole Bass '83, '97MSL

Living in New Haven's East Rock neighborhood, Holly Parker had an easy commute to Yale by bike or on foot. With her Yale-sponsored Zipcar membership, she managed to avoid owning a car altogether.

But now Parker lives in rural eastern Connecticut, where her husband teaches and owns a house. It's an hour's drive from Yale, or two and a half hours by public transit—or would be, that is, if the bus and train schedules lined up properly. Which they don't.

Parker's commuting conundrum illustrates the challenges she faces as Yale tries to get employees out of their cars and into carpools, transit, or other alternatives to driving alone. For Parker is no ordinary Yale commuter: she's the director of sustainable transportation, hired two years ago to help tame the university's output of greenhouse gases and other tailpipe emissions.

Commuting is only one piece of the sustainable transportation puzzle—- but it's a big piece, and the toughest to solve.

Combine a car-centered culture with transit that is unreliable, poorly coordinated, or just plain non-existent, and you get the solo automobile commute: the default for most people who can afford it. At Yale, that equals 37 percent of the more than 18,000 faculty, staff, and graduate students—- down a "remarkable" 7 percentage points from last year, Parker says. (If you leave out grad students, the figure rises to 51 percent.)

The drive-alone drop is one measure of the progress Yale has made in Parker's two years on the job. Other measures are harder to come by, since the university is still working on developing numerical goals and even on gauging the amount of transportation-related greenhouse gases it generates. What's more, some of the progress undoubtedly stems from rising gas prices rather than from anything Yale has done.

But Yale has taken steps. Car pool incentives, which include free or discounted parking and reimbursement for a certain number of emergency cab rides, have spurred "an enormous increase in car pooling," Parker notes: from 160 participants in September 2007 to 345 in May 2009. Zipcars, introduced less than two years ago, are now available at eight campus locations for convenient, short-term rentals.

Bicyles are another success story. The proportion of bike commuters shot up from 5 percent to 9 percent last year, Parker says: "I've never seen that kind of increase in thirteen years in the field."

In addition, her office has launched a departmental bike-sharing program, distributing about 25 bicycles for cross-campus errands and issuing a Platinum Pedal Mileage Challenge. With half the departments reporting after the first month, the bikers had logged more than 500 miles, "which corresponds to 500 pounds of CO₂ avoided," Parker says.

To accommodate those bikes—- and the hundreds of student bicycles on campus—- Yale has commissioned a new "standard" bike rack that will eventually replace the hodgepodge of existing types. Designed by Kimo Griggs '79, '84MArch, a metal fabricator and member of the architecture faculty, the new racks come in two styles: traditional, for the neo-Gothic and Georgian buildings, and "botanical," for the university's modern buildings. The designs are not only stylish but also "far more functional" than many of the current racks, Parker says.

An independent assessment of Yale's efforts comes from the College Sustainability Report Card, published by the Massachusetts-based Sustainable Endowments Institute. On its 2009 report card, Yale earned a B for transportation and a B+ overall. That's better than the C+ transportation average among the 300 top-endowed schools in the U.S. and Canada. But it's the same grade that Yale pulled the previous year.

For comparison, Harvard also got a B for transportation. Brown University, located in a small New England city similar to New Haven, won an A for transportation and an overall A-.

One reason for Brown's higher rating may be its practice of giving all students, faculty, and staff a free statewide transit pass. Parker says Yale has considered subsidizing bus fares. But demand is low, and Yalies are less concerned with cost than with reliability and convenience, she says. So her office is soliciting feedback on what would make transit more practical for Yale users and forwarding the results to area transit agencies.