Arlington, Va.’s Crystal City neighborhood is among the finalists for Amazon’s vaunted second headquarters, which The Washington Post says could be announced before the end of the year.
And there are certainly a lot of good reasons for Amazon to locate in Arlington. For one, it’s the home of Mobility Lab and the largest transportation demand management program in the United States.
What does that mean? Well, it translates to Amazon having access to a deep pool of experts working to make sure roads and transit have balanced flows of people traveling through them. It helps that the transportation options are nearly endless in Arlington – from National Airport to Metro, Metrobuses, ART buses, Capital Bikeshare, electric scooters, and transportation benefit programs for commuters, all of which helps thin the potentially crippling traffic for drivers.
No matter where HQ2 lands, the hope is that Amazon sets a gold standard for companies and CEOs like Jeff Bezos that have the power to impact quality-of-life and sustainability for the immediate communities that will be most impacted by their choice of location.
Although not nearly enough companies are taking great, innovative approaches towards helping their employees get to work with fewer headaches, there are some good examples for Amazon to consider:
As part of Nestle’s strategy to attract the best talent, the company moved its headquarters this year from California to Arlington. This also includes a move for its subsidiary Gerber from New Jersey to Arlington. The company is now located down the street from Mobility Lab, and our close partners at Arlington Transportation Partners actually sent staff to California to speak to Nestle’s employees about the many options that could help them leave their solo car commutes behind.
Along those lines of making a physical move as transportation innovation: In 2010, 88 percent of employees at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation drove alone to their jobs. But then the company began a TDM program with our experts and, within a year, that number dropped to 42 percent and continues to decrease. Although the foundation moved from a more suburban Seattle location to a more urban setting, it still took time to educate staff about their transportation options, and implement incentives that would motivate them to change their commute behavior. The program uses software to track employee commuting trends, wisely disincentivizes parking by charging a daily rather than monthly rate, pays employees $3 daily for traveling sustainably to work, and much more.
LinkedIn and Facebook have some great programs to incentivize bicycling and walking.
One great example comes from Coke, whose chairman of the board donated his parking space to bike parking – in car-clogged Atlanta of all places. That gesture seems minor, but small changes can set the tone for how a workplace prioritizes employees who don’t drive.
Company shuttle services are often touted in the news and can certainly be a great option when workers are clustered close enough in neighborhoods to make such a system work efficiently. Microsoft‘s 94 “Connector” stops transport an average of 4,300 employees to and from work each day, contributing to the company’s impressively low 43 percent drive-alone rate at its Seattle Puget Sound campus.
Back in Arlington, there is a really cool program that is administered by Arlington Transportation Partners called Champions. It essentially creates competition among 233 businesses, hotels, schools, and residential properties operating throughout the county to have the best possible transportation benefits. Nothing like a little competition to get people to change their bad habit of driving alone every day to some other option.
While Amazon and many of these examples are clearly big-company examples, all companies need to publicize federal transit tax benefits available to their employees. This is a boring but crucial one that many of the largest and smallest companies miss out on, in terms of financial and societal benefits. And all too often, companies only publicize the benefits available to people parking at their businesses, leaving out the far more sustainable benefits available for people taking transit, biking, walking, scootering, or using other options. From smaller companies, an often-easier way to affect a region might be through strong telework policies, like that of startup TransitScreen (which began at Mobility Lab).
Universities are ones we shouldn’t forget, as they are often at the forefront of transportation innovation. One great example is Oregon Health & Science University. It’s located in Portland on steep hills interrupted by a river and is accessible by only two main roads. So if everybody drove alone to the campus, no one would get there. To avoid traffic jams, OHSU had to get creative with transportation, including an aerial tram, free shuttles every 10 minutes to half hour, multiple bridges, copious bicycle and walking paths and bridges, and even kayaking.
And on the other end of the spectrum, there’s Apple, whose decision to build a mammoth headquarters in Cupertino, California – miles from public transportation and adequate housing – amounts to a corporate denunciation of sustainability. Leadership for the tech giant maintains that the new campus offers “a serene environment reflecting Apple’s values of innovation, ease of use, and beauty.” However, the simple facts show that many of Apple’s 13,000 employees are now commuting to an isolated location 45 miles south of San Francisco.
No matter whether Amazon comes to Arlington or one of the other finalists such as Dallas or New York City, these examples are just a handful of the ways the company can befriend a region. Its arrival in Crystal City would be an interesting challenge to regional planners. But with smart strategies to get employees out of cars, Amazon could make transportation improvements that would benefit everyone.
Photo by Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab.