Harvard University has announced a new set of benefits to it’s employees to cycle to work. These benefits include reimbursements for bike maintenance and emergency cab rides home in the event that an employee needs to leave quickly. The subsidies are likely around the same cost as those for MBTA riders, but help reduce pollution and (far more importantly) make for a healthier employee base. And when you’re a large, self-insured group with an employee base that tends to stick around for several years, those health savings can be huge over time.
For those of you, the intellectually curious readers you are, that want to read more, this article highlights some interesting work in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Despite a growth of 40% in the neighborhood’s business space since 2000, traffic flows have reduced by 14%. While I would prefer to see more of the push coming from companies themselves and less from the government side of things, it’s cool to see good public policy at work. Especially given that any pollution reductions benefit the relatively low-resource neighborhood of East Cambridge (census tracts 3523, 35266, 3527).
It’s not often I say this (it actually kind of hurts me) but – Way to go Harvard?
Hard, Not Impossible 