Getting Off Road
By Geoff Kohl
Ellen Wacht wants to make your life easier. As the director of Metro Atlanta’s Clean Air Campaign she is pushing for Atlanta’s businesses to offer telework programs, alternative scheduling, and carpooling, vanpooling and mass transit options.
Here’s the situation. Atlanta faces a problem that most major metro areas deal with—heavy traffic that generates smog. Our sprawling landscape has allowed for housing prices to remain moderate, but it’s also meant that Atlanta’s average commute times and distances have kept us in the nations’s top 10 longest commutes.
The average commute distance per Atlantan is 32.5 miles per person per day. It’s a number applied to every resident in Atlanta, driving or not—per commuting individual, the number would be much higher. It adds up to 124 million miles driven per day in Atlanta’s most central 11 counties. The time spent in traffic is estimated to create a $9 billion loss in time and fuel expenses per year.
The Clean Air Campaign has taken these challenges head on—starting with the positioning of their offices within a short walk of a MARTA rail station. It doesn’t end there. The small staff of the organization has initiated contact with local businesses like Lockheed Martin, an aviation contractor, to develop extensive vanpools (some come from as far as Alabama), as well as alternative schedules that redistribute workweeks to four-day-per-week schedules. Wacht says that less time spent behind the wheel creates happier employees—a tune businesses love to hear because it means higher employee retention. The group also offers informative programs to teach businesses about teleworking. Wacht cites studies performed by AT&T that indicate that teleworking can actually boost employee productivity by 20 percent.
Every little step, says Wacht, takes another car off Atlanta’s busy freeways. And there’s been good news. In the last 10 years, with over a million people added to Atlanta’s population, air quality hasn’t decreased, thanks mainly to technological improvements in autos and power plants. Now as the metro area prepares for an additional 2.3 million people in the next 25 years, the campaign is as important as ever.
Wacht understands the challenge.
“It takes time to change people’s behavior,” she says.
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