November 1, 2007

I'll take that to go

With a menu that includes Zipcars, buses, vanpools and other alternatives to
driving to work alone, Yale is taking steps to reduce the size of the university's
"carbon footprint."

Six Zipcar vehicles are available for rental by Yale students, faculty and staff, including two cars at the medical school parked at the corner of College and Congress streets.

In 2005, Yale announced its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 43 percent, which would bring them 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Since then, the university has achieved a 17 percent reduction, and new initiatives are expected to double that.

At a recent conference presented by the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, President Richard C. Levin described the steps Yale is taking to become greener, including the installation of more efficient heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, recycling more campus waste, replacing windows throughout the campus with thermally efficient ones and using renewable fuel in buses and turbines.

A significant part of that effort will be to reduce the university’s carbon footprint caused by transportation. A number of initiatives have been launched or are planned to achieve that goal.

"You can't expect people to stop driving to work if they don't have good alternatives," says Holly Parker, Yale's new director of sustainable transportation systems.

“There’s been tremendous support for sustainability initiatives at Yale, particularly transportation-related ones,” says Holly Parker, Yale’s director of sustainable transportation systems. Parker’s job is to come up with ways to support Yale’s growth plans while reducing the number of one-occupant vehicles on campus by developing user-friendly alternatives. Before coming to Yale in May, she was the manager of Harvard University’s Commuter Choice Program.

“People’s needs are very diverse—childcare issues, irregular work hours, long-distance commutes, intra-campus mobility needs—so we need to provide as many solid options as possible,” says Parker. “You can’t expect people to stop driving to work if they don’t have good alternatives.”

Measures that have recently been implemented to encourage the Yale community to get to and from work using alternatives to the one-occupant car are:

• Zipcar. The world’s largest car-sharing service, Zipcar has six cars for rent around the clock. The cars, located in five Yale locations, may be used by faculty, staff and students aged 18 and over. It costs $35 a year to join Zipcar. The membership cost may be applied to rental costs during the first month after joining. Once you have become a member and received your Zipcard in the mail, reserve a car online, enter it with your Zipcard, and drive off. The rental fee is $8.50 an hour and $65 a day. Those under 21 must have two years driving experience and a clean driving record. For those over age 21, membership also provides access to the network of 3,500 Zipcars in North America and the United Kingdom.

Parker said the car-sharing service, which was launched at the beginning of the school year, is a natural for an academic environment. “By mid-October, we already had more than 1,000 hours reserved for the month. We’ve had eight reservations already today.” Parker said the concept is similar to renting a car except that the procedure is much simpler. “There’s no paperwork,” she said. “Making a reservation takes 20 to 30 seconds, and the insurance, maintenance and gas are all built into the hourly fee.”

Other incentives to encourage the Yale community to use bicycles, walk, take mass transit, or use carpools or vanpools to get to campus include:

• Guaranteed Ride Home Program. This service provides free rides home by taxi to public-transportation or carpool users in the event of an emergency.
• Discounted parking for carpoolers (60 percent off the annual permit if you carpool with one other person, 75 percent off if you carpool with two or more).
• Free local transit via the campus shuttle system. Buses now run more frequently, and new global positioning system devices on the buses, linked to display screens and a website, allow users to track their bus along its route in real time, making it more convenient to use the service.
• Pre-tax savings. People who use public transportation may hold back up to $110 a month, pre-tax, from their paychecks to pay for transit costs.
• Bike racks on the Yale shuttle buses. “We’re trying to make as many links between different modes of transportation as possible, based on needs,” Parker says.

Parker says the next step is to conduct a survey to find out how people are getting to work and to learn what might encourage them to try other forms of transportation. She also wants make the city transportation hubs, such as Union Station, the State Street station, the medical school, and the main campus, as multi-modal as possible. Union Station, which can already be reached by car, Yale shuttle, Connecticut Transit bus and bicycle (there’s a locked room where bikes can safely be stored), is a good example of what she’s aiming for.

“We want to create dynamic transit hubs that allow people lots of options in terms of how they get around,” Parker said.

—Jennifer Kaylin

Learn more about Yale’s transportation benefits at www.yale.edu/parkingandtransit/ or by contacting Parker at holly.parker@yale.edu.  To become a Zipcar member or to learn more about Yale’s Zipcar program, visit www.zipcar.com/yale.

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