Ride-Share Week: how ridesharing works for Kodak’s employees
Geof Cryer, Health, Safety and Environment Manager for Kodak!
For this year’s Ride-Share Week, I thought it might be neat to see how some businesses have encouraged ridesharing in their workplaces.
So I spoke to Geof Cryer, Health, Safety and Environment Manager for Kodak, about the company ridesharing program implemented at their Burnaby office.
Have a read through—perhaps this can help your office encourage ridesharing in the workplace!
I understand that Kodak has really encouraged its employees to rideshare to the office. Can you tell me a bit about the program?
Well, we started with very little in the way of ridesharing. We were interested in reducing our environmental footprint—we have a green team that pushes environmental initiatives in general—and when we did a survey, we found that 80% were vehicle drivers, 52% were single occupancy vehicles. This has a massive impact. If you can do something about ridesharing, this will have more impact than turning off a few light bulbs.
So we wanted to get together a program that would work comprehensively. There was a huge opportunity to improve!
Where is the Kodak office located? Is there anything that makes your location more conducive to ridesharing rather than transit?
We’re in Burnaby, at Kincaid and Gilmore. It’s a 20 minute walk to nearest SkyTrain. Buses stop right outside our office, but many of our 550 employees are living out in Tri-Cities, North Vancouver, and Surrey. So the commute will be very long if you take the bus service. I can’t remember the exact times for Port Moody, but the transit trip in itself is something in excess of an hour and a half. So some sort of personal transport is definitely needed.
