Mornings at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the employee parking lot fills with staff members on bicycles and in car pools-outnumbering the few who ride to work in their own cars.
Those who bike or share rides are greeted with prime parking, hot muffins, coffee and a shower if they want one. Employees who drive to work alone are relegated to a dirt parking lot and charged a hefty parking fee.
A little more than a year after the aquarium instituted incentives to encourage alternative transportation, the program is a success, with 53 percent of the 265 employees getting to work without getting into a car alone.
”We`re always trying to think of something creative and fun to thank people because really we`ve asked them to change their lifestyle,” said Eileen Johnson, who was hired by the aquarium to develop and manage the transportation program.
While increasing numbers of businesses encourage ride-sharing, the aquarium program is one of the most advanced and successful in the state, Johnson said. That owes something to the brand of people who work at the aquarium, most of them biologists with a keen awareness of the environment, and a lot to the perks the aquarium offers to employees.
”We do have sort of a leg up on other organizations because we`re an environmental organization, and I think people here like to `walk their talk,` ” Johnson said.
When the program began in October 1990, the aquarium gave gifts of walking shoes and umbrellas to staff members who walked to work, bike lights for bicyclists and kayak trips and free lunches to all using alternative forms of transportation.
Later, the aquarium began to charge for parking and gave car-poolers drastically lower rates, along with preferential parking. The aquarium leases a van that carries about 11 employees from their homes to work and is planning to lease another.
It offers bike covers to bicyclists and free bus tickets to cyclists stranded by bad weather, and it has worked out a discount program with the county bus service for employees who ride the bus.
