The employer mobility plans: Benefits, acceptability and effectiveness

EMPLOYER MOBILITY PLANS: ACCEPTABILITY, EFFICIENCY AND COSTS The concentrated and repeated nature of commuting traffic offers action potentials to control or reduce the number of single-occupant vehicles commuting during the peak hours. As source of the home-to-work journeys, the companies have a ringside seat to promote sustainable mobility and the last years paid an always growing attention to that mobility issue. Though, the research literature have brought only few attention to the employer mobility plans (EMPs) implemented by the companies. The question about the effectiveness of the measure taken by the companies remains so open, as well as questions about their costs and benefits to the company. What is the impact of EMPs? Do they change the commuting behaviour of the workers? What are their costs and benefits for a company? Hence, the main objective of this paper is twofold: first evaluating the effectiveness of policy measures making up EMPs, and secondly assessing their costs and benefits at the company level. To achieve this aim 60 employees transport coordinators (ETCs) will be interviewed. Even if the literature is almost silent about this topic, the paper starts with a state of the art of the literature. This will help top define the different concepts and to classify the policy measures companies can take. The latter are called either push or pull measures. The Belgian home to work travels survey conducted every 3 years by the FPS Mobility and Transport will then be presented. This survey is focused on the companies located in Belgium and employing at least 100 workers. The database contains 8820 workplaces. Each record describes the commuting behaviour of the employees as well as the mobility policy that is implemented by the firm. The database will be used to identify clusters of companies, based on the success of the implemented EMP. Considering this criteria, it comes out that only few EMPs can be considered as successful. ETCs of the latter will then be interviewed to lead to an in-depth understanding of the causes and effects of EMPs.