New proposed legislation defines and funds TDM initiatives that could provide communities with opportunities to tackle transportation challenges more effectively based on local needs. Amid the blizzard of legislation in the early days of the Biden administration, it’s easy to overlook a small but important bill, H.R. 2514, the Mobility Options, Resiliency, and Efficiency (MORE) through TDM Act. If passed, this bill would fund Transportation Demand Management (TDM) nationally, helping to change the way people get around, from a system that subsidizes solo car trips to one that encourages mixed modes. On the ground, if enacted, the bill “puts out a new pot of money to deliver services and programs focused on improving transportation options,” according to David Straus, Executive Director of the Association for Commuter Transportation. This would save money, reduce traffic congestion, and help the environment. As Rob Henry, Public Policy Director of the Association for Commuter Transportation, put it, our current transportation paradigm is not sustainable – “from a climate perspective, and an economic perspective, TDM provides more choices for people.” These choices encompass public transit, biking, walking, and scootering.
Despite TDM’s tremendous potential, most people have no idea what it is, and even those who have heard the term might not understand it well.
When it comes to transportation, TDM is the successful complement to infrastructure, it focuses on understanding how people make their transportation decisions and helping people use the infrastructure in place for transit, ridesharing, walking, biking, and telework. “TDM is how you leverage the investments we make in our infrastructure and get the maximum benefit,” said Dennis Leach, Director of Transportation, Arlington. As Straus put it, “TDM is all about how we create an efficient multi-modal system that moves people” in the most affordable, efficient, and sustainable way possible. Or, as the MORE Act defines it, TDM is “the use of strategies to inform and encourage travelers to maximize the efficiency of a transportation system leading to improved mobility, reduced congestion, and lower vehicle emissions.” One can think of transportation infrastructure, roads, rails, and bridges, as well as cars, trains, and buses, as equivalent to the bones and muscles in the human body and TDM as equivalent to the nervous system, making decisions about how to use muscles and activating them through small, local nerve endings.
More concretely, the Association for Commuter Transportation describes TDM’s benefits as providing options for commuters, reducing traffic congestion, improving public health and safety, and connecting people to jobs.
What the MORE Act would do
H.R. 2514, the MORE Act, would first, define TDM at the federal level, and second provide a stream of dedicated funding, some $1 billion a year, said Rob Henry, and would mandate a TDM committee in each state. Currently, those jurisdictions that have TDM programs, cobble together a budget “through funding sources here and there and all over,” said Henry. If the bill is signed into law, funds would be allocated to the states and make their way to the local level, providing not just funding but awareness and goals regarding TDM.
The shape and character of TDM would be different in different jurisdictions, depending upon their needs. Indeed, the MORE Act allows plenty of choice at the local level. “There’s no one-size-fits all kind of approach to implementing TDM within local communities,” said Straus. For instance, rural areas may rely more on carpools and vanpools, made flexible by technology.
Behavioral change is notoriously difficult, and, in a country long dependent on cars, it’s hard to get people to shift to modes that might seem less convenient. Explained Straus, “one of the barriers with behavior change, especially when it comes to commuting behavior, you get into the pattern of ‘I drive to work, I drive to work, I drive to work.’ You know the public transit’s there, you may know that there’s a group of van pools in the parking lot, but don’t know how to access it . . . and you’re not confident about its ability to get you on a consistent basis from home to work.” Fear of the unknown breeds resistance to change. Old habits die hard.
Travel demand management encourages behavioral change in three basic ways: awareness, education, and incentives. TDM programs partner with businesses—and, increasingly, with apartment complexes and condo associations—to inform people about the array of options available. They also encourage incentives, such as discounts or free passes for bus, rail, and even bikeshare, to match the incentives already given for vanpoolers. In some cases, TDM even discourages incentives for car trips, notably free and ample parking, which supports a mode that causes congestion, air pollution, and climate-change emissions.
May 10 is the launch of TDM Week to help promote these powerful, underutilized strategies. As such, the Association for Commuter Transportation is encouraging its members to advocate for the TDM bill in Congress, as well as share stories of TDM’s benefits, said Henry. If the bill passes, more awareness of TDM has the potential to be a game changer. As Straus explained, “If more communities utilized TDM strategies, we could actually help increase the efficiencies of the systems that are already in place, and it helps potentially reduce some of the capital infrastructure intensive costs.”
TDM is not to be taken lightly and forgotten, but a way of thinking and doing business. “It’s not a short-term commitment; it extends beyond one legislative cycle,“ said Leach. He pointed to five years as the minimum to entrench TDM and institute behavioral change. It’s a long-term endeavor, more like marriage than like dating. At the individual level, it means “providing more mobility options for the residents, it’s getting folks to understand that they have the ability to perhaps live without having to have a car to access all of the necessary services,” said Straus.
Arlington County, Virginia provides lessons
As one of the pioneers in TDM, Arlington, VA has a special role in showing how such programs can be effective. Indeed, Arlington’s TDM program removes over 50,000 solo car trips each workday (at least prior to the pandemic), greatly facilitating a free flow of traffic in a region otherwise among the worst in the country for congestion.
Arlington works its vision for TDM through a comprehensive program that identifies data driven opportunities to influence travel choice for all people and all trips. “TDM studies are completed for each and every site plan development that is approved and built here in Arlington,” said Leach, coming up with a plan to reduce solo car trips and provide options and then monitoring that plan. For residential buildings, these plans come in five categories: travel information; shuttle to Metro; transit support such as free or discounted SmarTrip Cards; bicycle amenities such as secure parking; and unbundled parking, so that residents do not default to free parking. The plans are supported by a framework of professionals that educate properties and their residents about available amenities and transportation options.
These staff supported plans are effective. In residential buildings, the number of car trips was down 40% over what would otherwise be expected, according to the 2018 Arlington County Residential Building Study, which covered 36 properties throughout the county. Office buildings, meanwhile, “generated weekday daily trips at rates between 39 and 79 percent” of what would be expected in a normal American region without TDM, according to the 2016 Office Building Transportation Performance Monitoring Study. Furthermore, those who received “transit subsidies were about twice as likely to commute by transit, while parking subsidies were correlated with an increase in driving alone.” Clearly, the incentive structure in most of America has been backward, encouraging more driving. Creating awareness along with providing incentives work and it is critical to provide both if you want to maximize the results of TDM for your community. Together, a staff of TDM professionals and community supported programs increase behaviors such as walking, biking, and taking public transit. The result of these behavior changes are social benefits, improved public health and environmental good.
Arlington County has been a pioneer in evaluating those TDM programs, initiatives, and efforts. It is one of the few entities in the United States who has defined a robust set of TDM performance measures, and who periodically collects data to evaluate performance. This robust data collected for over twenty years has allowed Arlington to turn its evaluation methodology into the Country’s first transportation demand management return on investment (ROI) calculator that helps programs see the value of using and investing in TDM. This resource, backed by FHWA, is available to any TDM program across the country.
Parking is also one of the key areas in which the United States incentivizes driving, by greatly subsidizing a valuable commodity or even making it free. Arlington has reversed this, with “a history of reducing parking requirements,” said Leach. For a long time, one space was required for every two employees in commercial offices, but recently, Leach added, “in places like Pentagon, Crystal City, Rosslyn, that has been reduced,” to “one space for every four to five employees.” Of 36 residential properties studied throughout Arlington, “Seventy-five percent of the sites have unbundled parking costs,” so residents pay extra for a parking space, according to the residential building study. Meanwhile, the office building study found average weekday parking occupancy at only 50% to 85% of the maximum. Thanks largely to TDM, there is ample unused parking space.
The impact is measurable; “Where parking is unbundled, there is approximately 6% lower auto ownership per unit and 13% lower auto ownership per adult resident,” according to the residential building study. Indeed, in the future these buildings may be able to reduce parking even more, since “over 20% of the parking supply is excess.”
Parking at work is the other side of the equation. In the residential study, “fifty-three percent of respondents do not pay to park at work”; even more notably, where a parking charge is added, “driving alone drops from 71% to 28%.” The roads are less congested and valuable space is freed up for residents, or perhaps more green space. For instance, because Arlington builds less parking than occurs nationally, even at high-density sites, “we’re basically taking sites that were grey sites, surface parking lots or underutilized strip development, converting them to more urban densities, but with street trees and plazas, so we’re actually redeveloping greener,” said Leach. Reducing pavement also reduces run-off of pollutants into waterways.
If enacted, HR 2514 will provide great opportunities to expand TDM, but the money will likely flow first to the states, which will then implement it. This might prove most helpful in other parts of Virginia that do not have advanced TDM programs. “Arlington has led the way for many years, and frankly, even within Virginia you don’t find that level of commitment,” said Jim Larsen, Bureau Chief, Arlington County Commuter Services. So far, Arlington has paid for its TDM largely with federal funds allocated to clean up the air, provided by the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program. While that funding could have been used in other ways, Leach explained that “Arlington has chosen to put all of its congestion air quality money year after year into TDM. This makes sense, since TDM is an extremely efficient way of squeezing value out of every dollar spent, with its ability to leverage already existing infrastructure.”
The sustainable path to TDM in Arlington
TDM in Arlington began in 1989, administered by Arlington County Commuter Services (ACCS). Today, the agency and its units continue the mission to “provide information and innovative services that change travel behavior by making it easy and intuitive for users of Arlington’s transportation network to choose walking, biking, public transit, and sharing the ride,” according to the Transportation Demand Management Plan for 2018-2023.
“We would like to see the term TDM, and the behavior change strategies associated with TDM normalized with the advent of this new legislation” said Lois DeMeester, CEO of the Destination Sales & Marketing Group (DS&MG). DS&MG has partnered with Arlington County Commuter Services since 1998 and helped found Arlington Transportation Partners (ATP), which she describes as “ the business-to-business outreach entity”, meaning in layman’s terms, a sales force. “We turned TDM into a tangible term with tangible actions that people could grasp. Previously, public transportation messaging and promotion lacked professionalism and seriousness and was not viewed as highly valued low-cost or tax-free benefits for an employee or workforce. With ATP’s technical expertise and guidance offered to business decision makers, efforts at adopting TDM became easy, accountable, and face-to-face. “Fostering relationships and teaching the business bottom line benefits of TDM like increased employee productivity, retention of quality employees, less stress and absenteeism, lower health care costs, reduced need for parking and spending time in never ending traffic, provided solutions that business found valuable and easy to implement,” DeMeester explained.
Leach similarly lauded “our ATP business-to-business service where we make personal contacts with employers, their HR directors, really helping them with benefit programs,” adding that ATP has similar programs for residential buildings and hotels. Both DeMeester and Leach emphasized that TDM should be easy to market, since it gives businesses a competitive edge at attracting employees who want flexible options for getting to work, and want to help the planet, too.
“What stands in the way of TDM being a household name is the lack of long-term robust funding, lack of awareness about how TDM creates customers for public transportation systems and the difficulty of instituting behavioral change to diverse populations of consumers,” said DeMeester. ATP’s behavior change strategies and direct marketing prowess helped to break these barriers. DeMeester stated that “businesses that adopt TDM make a personal commitment to their employees by either paying for the transit trip outright or by offering a pre-tax subsidy for their employees to get to work. Those habits would also influence people’s daily lives, perhaps they might choose to bike to the grocery store on a Saturday versus getting in that car.” Overall, she summed up, “we’re changing habits and forming habits through promoting consistent use of transit, biking, and walking.”
ATP has broadened its focus over the years, adding an array of programs. “Up until the early 2000s it was very much focused on promoting Metrobus and Metrorail,” said Leach. ATP “has evolved over time to promote all forms of non-auto trip-making,” adding WalkArlington and BikeArlington. Indeed, in 2010 Arlington was one of two partners—Washington, DC was the other—to launch Capital Bikeshare, the first such system in the United States. ATP also helped launch the region’s first two car sharing systems, Flexcar and Zipcar.
In its early days, research about TDM was lacking. Identifying this gap, The Destination Sales and Marketing Group partnered again with Arlington County Commuter Services in 2006 and embarked on creating original research to assess strategies, develop performance metrics, and figure out the best means of getting people to use public transit. To house the research, and move it forward, DeMeester had the idea for a TDM University. However, transportation demand management was—and remains— misunderstood and the name “TDM University” would just be confusing. So, in 2009 Mobility Lab was born. This provided a platform to promote and disseminate understanding and best practices associated with TDM and demonstrate its value through scientific research.
Over the years since Mobility Lab began, “we’ve created a huge national voice for Arlington and for Arlington County Commuter Services that was picked up all over the United States and beyond,” said DeMeester. In the last ten years alone, Arlington Transportation Partners, Mobility Lab, and their sister organizations BikeArlington and WalkArlington have received multiple awards from the Association for Commuter Transportation, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the League of American Bicyclists, as well as Hermes Creative Awards, American Graphic Design Awards, and many others.
Beyond the pandemic
In early 2020, as the nation shut down in the face of the pandemic, ATP had a huge impact in helping the region move rapidly to telework. “Our ATP unit has been working for years, with cutting edge teaching and understanding of telework,” said Larsen. “As soon as the pandemic hit, suddenly all kinds of companies that didn’t even understand what that meant” needed careful guidance from ATP in instituting emergency telework policies. As Rob Henry put it, COVID took “a lot of organizations that were saying there’s no way our company could ever work remotely, and then they did.” A survey of Arlington employers conducted by ATP showed that while 44% of employers lacked a formal telework policy, nearly 90% of companies had more than three-quarters of their workforce working remotely as of March 2020.
Coming out of the COVID era provides its own opportunities and challenges for TDM. “The pandemic, horrible as it is, provided a jolt of new thinking and has spurred people to experiment with different modes, namely walking and biking. “Communities that said there’s no way we could ever put in bike lanes have provided them on a temporary basis and they will hopefully become permanent,” said Henry. As walking and biking has seen an increase, the pandemic has greatly lowered the use of, and trust in, public transit. Notably, Metrorail was, at its ridership’s lowest point, down some 90% and buses were relegated to essential workers who had no other form of transportation. As the country moves back to normal—or to some kind of “new normal”— Arlington’s collective TDM capabilities will undoubtedly be useful in maintaining the gains in walking, biking, and scootering that occurred during the pandemic. Transit faces huge challenges but cannot be neglected. COVID-19 did reveal buses and trains to be “the only way to get to and from” essential work such as hospital, manufacturing, and grocery jobs, said Henry. Still, DeMeester pointed out, “transit may take on a different character, with peak days mid-week, more riders in the evening and fewer riders at peak hours with other new nimble and flexible transit supportive services enabled by technology.”
A new emphasis on TDM could help make walking, biking, and scootering an everyday occurrence, not just a rarity, while encouraging people to return to buses, trains, and car and vanpooling once these modes are again perceived as safe. With the United States back in the Paris Agreement to limit climate change, and transportation currently the largest source of greenhouse gases, TDM has the potential to help the country meet its international commitments and move toward a sustainable future.
For the MORE Act to work by stimulating more TDM across the nation and move us to being a society in which walkers, bicyclists, and scooter, bus, and train users thrive safely alongside cars, it must clear one huge obstacle—the U.S. Senate. Even in these partisan times, this may be easier than it seems, as the bill’s provisions may end up attached to the larger transportation bill, explained Henry. This is often a bipartisan endeavor that could garner the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate. It’s also possible that the bill would ultimately be passed by a maneuver known as reconciliation, which only needs 51 Senate votes.
The stakes are high. Besides providing a better quality of life, reducing automobiles and associated infrastructure is crucial to hitting environmental targets, notably reducing greenhouse gases. TDM advocates and policy makers have “been green since before it was cool to be green,” said DeMeester, “by taking cars off the road and making the road networks operate better. ” The stars just might be auspicious for a revolution in behavior and funding. “The behavioral change aspect, the economic aspect, the climate aspect, there are many things that are aligning,” said Henry. “We think it’s a once in a generation opportunity to reset our transportation path.”