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The case for providing mobility and transit to your employees
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The case for providing mobility and transit to your employees

It’s a golden opportunity for organizations to offer their employees a better mobility solution: one that enables effortless and stress-free from home to work and everywhere in between, that can encourage team members to work in the office again, greatly boost environmental sustainability goals, and ultimately improve quality-of-life and employee retention.

Jeff Stade
May 25, 2022

At Jawnt, we enable organizations to seamlessly offer many mobility options to their employees. For decades, organizations have been struggling to manage the transportation needs of employees and clients. Commuters have been steadily traveling farther and farther to get to work, and as hybrid work patterns materialize coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, homes will be even more decoupled from jobs.

It’s a golden opportunity for organizations to offer their employees a better mobility solution: one that enables effortless and stress-free from home to work and everywhere in between, that can encourage team members to work in the office again, greatly boost environmental sustainability goals, and ultimately improve quality-of-life and employee retention.

We have recently seen a huge increase in the number of mobility options available even within one city. Between subways, bike, buses, and scooters, there are more options than ever to get around a city or get to work. Unfortunately, it can also be quite confusing.

Individual riders are still forced to figure out fares and pass pricing from a myriad of operators who may or may not talk to each other. It can be a challenge for employees just to understand what’s available to them, let alone use it to get to work.

Consider this the first area where Jawnt saves the day: Through Jawnt, employees get access to every transit and active mobility provider in your area all in one place. This particularly benefits organizations spread across several cities, so HR can know for each office the agencies and options available to them.

We then go to bat for you by directly working with mobility providers to provide discounted bulk-rate passes and fare policies for employees, saving untold hours of communication and figuring out which options are right for your organization. We enable personalized commute planning and offer employees the freedom to mix and match modes as they see fit, ensuring everyone will be able to save the most amount of money and time regardless of where they live. Finally, Jawnt fully integrates with our HR providers and payroll to quickly determine eligibility and directly include mobility passes into employee compensation, and take full advantage of federal, state, and local pre-tax transit benefits.

Jawnt is the next-generation mobility platform that builds upon past employer transit programs throughout the US. The importance of employer-provided transit and mobility subsidies have been widely recognized, under the banner of Commute Trip Reduction (CTR) programs. The Victoria Transport Policy Institute finds that CTR programs without financial incentives typically see 5–15% reduction in car commutes, and programs with financial incentives see a significantly higher 20–40% reduction. In Washington state, CTR has been a requirement of large employers since 1991, impacting up to 190,000 people. From 2010 to 2019, downtown Seattle saw total single-occupancy car trips (including work and non-work trips) decrease 9 percent, while public transit usage rose 4 percent in the same period.

Mandatory CTR could be coming to your city sooner than you expect. Cities such as Philadelphia are now considering making it mandatory for large employers to offer the federal pre-tax transit benefit to its workers. Time and time again, we’ve heard that employees really feel appreciated when they can get discounted transit as an employee benefit, but whether required or not, Jawnt can help your team make it a reality.

Lastly, Jawnt offers one of the clearest paths towards advancing an organization’s environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiatives. For decades, the typical solution to an organization’s transportation needs has been to facilitate driving, with building parking and roadway infrastructure as a default reaction. As the company grows, so too does this demand grow linearly at a great cost, both in capital cost in facilities as well as greenhouse gas emissions — no wonder why transportation is the leading source of emissions according to the EPA.

The shift towards greener solutions of commuting, such as carpooling and biking to work, still center around private car ownership. But in 2022, shared mobility options in bikes, scooters, and yes, public transit abound, and they are more than ready to serve the commute trip, whatever it may look like ahead.

The landscape of how we work and collaborate in the future is rapidly changing, but organizations can be assured that whenever employees and clients need to work somewhere in person, there will be a convenient, sustainable way to get there with Jawnt.

Thank you to Ben She for co-authoring this article. Highly recommend following Ben on Twitter for insights on Philadelphia’s transit scene and transit data.

Photo by Amos Bar-Zeev on Unsplash

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Stade

The Jawnt blog

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