Symposium: Utah companies do their best to cut down on vehicle miles

Whether it’s by subsidizing employees’ passes for mass transportation, offering telecommuting, encouraging carpooling or updating vehicle fleets, Utah companies are trying to cut the number of vehicles on the highways.

An Employer-Based Trip Reduction Symposium, hosted last week by the Utah Division of Air Quality, spotlighted the efforts aimed at easing traffic congestion and improving air quality, safety, health, quality of life and economic development opportunities. Vehicle travel is responsible for the majority of the ozone and high particulate pollution in Utah’s air, and the Utah Department of Workforce Services has estimated that in 2007-11, 80 percent of the state’s commuters traveled alone.

Bryce Bird, division director, said drivers travel a total of about 30 million miles on a typical winter weekday along the Wasatch Front. Sources of emissions include transportation, industrial and commerce, “so anything that we can do as business leaders to encourage those that drive to work to avoid that single-occupant-vehicle trip is what we’re really focusing on today,” he said.

Chamonix Larsen, former resource stewardship coordinator for the state of Utah, said a survey indicated many Utahns simply prefer to drive their owns car to and from work.

“That’s an interesting response from these employees, but what I think it gives is insight,” she said. “If that’s just a preference, that’s something that can be changed. If people have a different value set or if they have a different perspective of what other options are out there, those things being a preference can actually change. They’re not barriers that are obviously insurmountable.”

Larsen said a “big leadership push” is needed to make teleworking part of everyday practice in business. “There’s needs to be an education to give confidence to managers that teleworking is a great option and that it can be something that can have positive effects or that people can be productive in those scenarios,” she said.

Steve Bergstrom, director of the Office of Sustainability at Intermountain Healthcare, echoed those remarks, adding that implementing working from home requires lots of training. His company has more than 300 people working from home and hopes to have the number reach 1,000 by year-end.

“It’s a little more complicated than saying, ‘We’re going to do it,’” Bergstrom said. “And there’s still a lot of apprehension on the part of a manager about allowing their people to work at home — how much are they watching TV or whatever? There’s a way to get them past that.”

Among its other efforts, Intermountain, with nearly 40,000 employees, subsidizes employees’ public transit passes, offers van share, places monitoring devices in company vehicles and is converting to newer vehicles that are more efficient, he said. Seven percent of its employees ride mass transit to and from work; he hopes the number grows to 15 percent.

An idle-reduction program started in 2008 at Kennecott Utah Copper was “a big culture change for us,” according to Chris Morrison, senior coordinator of fleet management for the company. However, the company in 2016 saved $1 million through fuel savings as a result of the program. That equates to 467,000 fewer gallons of fuel being used and 4,700 tons of greenhouse gases kept out of the air, he said. In 2008-16, the total was $16.8 million in savings, 5.5 million fewer gallons of fuel and 56,000 tons of greenhouse gases eliminated.

The company also has invested in vans and buses as a way of reducing the number of big trucks with single occupants at the work site and hopes this year to optimize the use of alternative-fuel vehicles.

Hill Air Force Base — the state’s largest single-site employer, with 21,000 workers — also has undertaken several programs. Already, 80 percent of employees take advantage of a flexible work schedule program, which translates into 32,000-64,000 fewer trips each month, according to Erik Dettenmaier, the base’s air program manager. A telework program started in 2009 has only 74 participants — “Obviously, you can’t turn wrenches from your own home,” he said — but about 750 people use a van pool program started in 2001, resulting in about 13,000 fewer trips.

Increasing the number of electric or plug-in electric vehicles is the goal for Leaders for Clean Air, according to its director, Max Bradshaw. It is encouraging companies to install electric vehicle charging stations at their business locations to make charging handy for their employees. The current goal is for 2,000 chargers along the Wasatch Front to provide access for 100,000 employees, he said. However, less than 1 percent of vehicles in Utah are electric or plug-in electric models.

“We’re at less than 1 percent and if we want to have serious change and really grow and help with the pollution problem we have in the valley, we need to get that to about 15 percent, and we have a long way to go,” Bradshaw said.

The University of Utah will try to be “climate-neutral” by 2050. By 2025, it hopes to get half of the people on campus out of their cars and instead using bicycles, mass transit, carpools, telecommuting or walking. Salt Lake City wants to reduce community carbon pollution by 80 percent by 2040 and have 100 percent net renewable electricity by 2032.

Val Hale, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED), said the environment is an element of Utah’s high quality of life, an attractive attribute when the state is trying to get companies to move to or expand in the state.

“Quality of life is something we have in abundance here, and we’re very fortunate,” Hale said. “It’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful economically in our state, and we need to preserve that quality of life. …”

But that quality of life could be jeopardized by population growth expected in the next few decades.

“You think about this valley and this state and the urban areas that we talked about, and 35 to 40 years from now thinking about having double the population: twice the people, twice the traffic, twice the congestion, twice the use of our facilities. It’s going to take some tremendous planning and effort to be prepared for that and to make sure that that growth doesn’t adversely affect our quality of life and our environment,” he said.

He described Utah’s growth as both a blessing and a curse.

“It’s a good and bad thing. We bring more people, more employees, more employers to the area, and, depending on the industry, some air quality issues. Most of our industry that we’re bringing in now is pretty much clean technology. There are a few that are maybe not falling in that category,” he said.

“But it’s something that we’ve got to learn to deal with because [of] our children and grandchildren. We’re growing and we’re going to need a lot of jobs over the next 50 years just to keep our population employed. There’s never a point where we can say, ‘Oh, that’s enough, we don’t need any more jobs,’ because if we do that or when we do that, it’s going to impact us down the road.”

While symposium speakers offered many suggestions for trip reduction, Byrd said new approaches will be needed in the future.

“We have the growth we’ve experienced right now. We have the current air pollution, the emissions, that we’re challenged with right now. We are not meeting the current federal health standards so we’re developing plans to address that,” he said. “But as we look at new growth, we can’t do the things that we’ve done in the past and expect to get an outcome that provides the environment that we want.”