RECONNECTING FORT WAYNE: Transportation Transportation Management Associations Prepared for City of Fort Wayne, Indiana By Janice Metzger & Stephen Perkins, Ph.D. Center for Neighborhood Technology December 2007 Reconnecting Fort Wayne: Transportation Transportation Management Associations Reconnecting Fort Wayne: Transportation is a six part report designed to promote sustainable transportation planning in Fort Wayne. The first five reports, published in December of 2007, are innovative approaches or tools for analyzing current conditions and offering more transportation choice and lower household transportation cost. These reports include: Car Sharing Housing + Transportation Streetcars Transportation Management Associations UPASS: Unlimited Transit Pass A sixth report, on transportation funding in Fort Wayne, will be produced in early 2008 to complete the series. Acknowledgements The Center for Neighborhood Technology would like to thank Mayor Graham Richard for his vision in initiating a multi-faceted review of opportunities for Fort Wayne to become a more sustainable city. We also thank Wendy Barrott for her energetic and thoughtful oversight of this and many other facets of the Reconnecting Fort Wayne consultation. Staff from several city, county and private entities offered valuable feedback on the potential receptivity of employers to the idea of a Transportation Management Association in Fort Wayne. We are especially grateful to Dan Carmody, former Executive Director of the Fort Wayne Downtown Improvement District, Chloretha Davie, Director of Human Resources for the City of Fort Wayne, Brian Dumford, Director of the Allen County Human Resources Department and Candy Knowles, Senior Vice President, Parkview Health. About the Center for Neighborhood Technology The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) was CNT serves as the umbrella for a number of projects and founded in 1978 to research, adapt and test new affiliate organizations, all of which help the organization community revitalization strategies relevant to urban fulfill its mission: to promote the development of more livable communities, especially strategies that harnessed the and sustainable urban communities. CNT’s transportation environmental and economic value of the more efficient work is focused on using transportation assets to serve use of naturalresources. Over the years, CNT has both the environmental and economic development goals worked to disclose the hidden assets of the Chicagoland of regions and communities. CNT works to boost demand economy and urban areas more broadly; demonstrate for clean, efficient and affordable mass transit; increase the multi-bottom line benefits of more resource-efficient the supply of traditional and non-traditional mass transit policies and practices; and show how the value of what we services; disclose the linkages between transportation demonstrated could be captured to benefit communities costs and housing affordability; create model value-capture and their residents inclusively. CNT’s work, especially in mechanisms that take advantage of the intersection of the areas of energy, transportation, materials conservation efficient transportation networks with community economic and housing preservation, helped fuel a generation development programs; and promote policy initiatives of community development institutions and learning, that increase public participation in investment decisions garnering us a reputation as an economic innovator and and make more resources available for sustainable leader in the field of creative sustainable development. investments. More information about CNT is available at www.cnt.org. RECONNECTING FORT WAYNE: Transportation Transportation Management Associations How and Why Might Fort Wayne Use a Transportation Management Association? A Summary of the Opportunities Leaders in Fort Wayne have identified sustainability as a strategy for economic growth that also improves the environment and quality of life. Transportation is one of the largest contributors to climate change and one of the biggest drains on household budgets (on average, transportation is the second largest household expenditure, after housing). Offering the public more transportation options is cost-effective for private and public budgets and can significantly improve environmental sustainability. Fort Wayne has many compact neighborhoods with nearby major employers and educational institutions. Although private automobiles are the mode of choice throughout Fort Wayne today, concentrated programming in these compact neighborhoods could create broader transportation choices, which in turn create significant household savings and environmental benefits. What is missing is the organizational mechanism for bringing a full range of transportation choice to Fort Wayne. Transportation Management Associations (TMAs) are a model used in a majority of states The Skyline from Headwaters Park in the U.S. to increase transportation choice at a local level. We propose that Fort Wayne develop a TMA to run innovative programs in up to five areas: the downtown/West Central neighborhood, the North River neighborhood, the IPFW/Ivy Tech area, the area around Parkview’s Randalia campus, and Renaissance Pointe. The most comprehensive strategy proposed is to link TMAs, car sharing and UPASS programs, with the TMA providing management of the other programs, to create areas of substantial transportation choice in Fort Wayne. These areas, which we call “Eco-Pods,” offer the greatest opportunity for the successful shift of some resident and/or visitor trips from private autos to other transportation options. While TMAs operate diverse types of services, the Fort Wayne TMA proposed here would potentially have these functions: • Promotion of walking and bicycling where feasible; • Bulk sales of student and employee transit passes and administration of a universal pass program; • Commuter services like van pools and ridesharing; • Accessory services to transit, such as promotion and employer education about tax-free options for employee purchase of transit passes; • Parking pricing and parking management services; • Car sharing (individual accounts for residents and business accounts for institutions). Fort Wayne has an opportunity to creatively mold a TMA that corresponds to local preferences, supports transportation choice, encourages the use of new choices and documents the economic and environmental benefits of exercising transportation choice. A TMA is the backbone, the organizational structure, on which to build diverse transportation options. RECONNECTING FORT WAYNE: Transportation Transportation Management Associations 1 Context, Purpose and Characteristics of TMAs Transportation Management Associations (TMAs) are public/private partnerships usually organized to address employer concerns about commute time or predictability. They have been in existence for over 20 years. Comprehensive information on existing TMAs in North America can be found in the 2003 Transportation Management Association Survey, conducted by the National Center for Transit Research at the University of South Florida, in conjunction with the Association for Commuter Transportation. Summary information from the survey will be cited here to provide an overview of how TMAs operate. The report of the full survey can be found in Appendix A. The survey was constructed to allow respondents to state the TMA purpose and mission in their own words. The initial mission/purpose responses were grouped in the categories by the researchers. Congestion was mentioned by over half (56%) of the respondents. Growth (17%), new development (13%), transit (13%) and air quality (11%) were clustered in a second tier of responses. Purposes that garnered only single-digit percentage responses included parking, regulation, new road or highway, trip reduction and land use. A variety of programs and services are offered by TMAs throughout the country to address the purposes and mission of TMAs. According to the most recent TMA Survey about half of responding TMAs offer promotional services/newsletters/events and offer Guaranteed Ride Home.1 In descending order, the next most frequently cited services in 2003 are listed below: Regional/local advocacy 41 Direct rideshare incentives 39 Tax benefit program assistance 38 Trip reduction plan preparation 38 Rideshare matching 37 Vanpool subsidy program 36 Subsidized transit passes 35 Vanpool services 35 Employee Transportation Coordinator (ETC) 34 Bicycle program 32 Telecommuting assistance 31 Most of these functions could be of benefit in Fort Wayne. Some, like the “tax benefit program assistance,” are already available but employers and employees are generally unaware that transit passes can be purchased with pre-tax dollars. Many TMAs not only promote, but help employers to administer, these types of programs. Over time, the services offered by TMA have changed. In 1993 two-thirds of all TMAs developed surveys, presumably to gather information on what services would be useful when TMAs were in their infancy. By the time of the 1998 and 2003 surveys, no respondents had offered surveys. New services were coming “on line” in 2003. The tax benefit program mentioned above was a response to federal tax reforms that made the benefit possible in 1998. Bicycle programs were offered by one-third of respondents in 2003, but were not really on the horizon in the 1998 survey. One of the most recent innovations for TMAs to adopt is car sharing, which has potential