(Image: Microsoft)
You know who doesn’t care about the new SR 520 tolls? Microsoft Connector passengers. Or, rather, they no longer have to care. When I asked Microsoft’s Lou Gellos if the Redmond-based company anticipated a boost in ridership of their private transit system, now that the 520 bridge is being tolled, he chuckled and said they’d already seen an increase: back in April, when the tolls were originally planned to go into effect.
Actually, I was displaying my own ignorance by asking the question. I was wondering if Microsoft Connector was prepared for a big ridership bump, but after consulting the Connector’s latest fact sheet, I found that the private transit system is nothing but ridership bumps. The number of routes provided has grown almost 500 percent in its three years of existence.
Established in September of 2007, Microsoft Connector had five routes and was expected to carry up to 1,000 passengers per day. By 2009, it was “one of the largest company-owned employee bus services in the U.S.” Fast forward to October 2011, and there are 22 routes driven by 65 buses, with capacity for just about 6,000. The express bus service is only for full-time Microsoft employees, who can ride it for free.
Microsoft says it’s had 14,000 unique riders–they know because employees make reservations for their trips, which helps Microsoft achieve a 43-percent-full rate across all its routes. (The company has some 40,000 employees in the Puget Sound region.) More importantly for congestion, 10,000 of those 14,000 took the Connector as an alternative to their single-occupancy vehicle. That’s over 2.1 million trips saved over three years, says Microsoft, understandably proudly, with fuel savings of $4.2 million.
Besides their very attractive “free” pricing, the coaches double as mobile workstations, coming with plugins and WiFi, and by all accounts conversation often takes a back seat to the tapping of laptop keys.
Microsoft employees are also offered free ORCA passes, and van pools, and car pools. (Registered van pools are also exempt from tolling.) There’s even a bike shuttle that will take bicycles across the bridge, 12 at a time, more than will fit on the front of a bus.
The only thing I can manage to be critical of, in all this, is that left out of the Connector equation, still, are contract employees. There are no contract bridges to Redmond, so they get there the same way as anyone else. As it becomes clearer that Connector is much more than a perk, but also a productivity driver and environmental low-impact statement, you hope that Microsoft will revisit the question of who rides, even if it’s not for free.
Michael do a search for “permatemp” and/or the wikipedia page for this. Contractors in the past filed a class action lawsuit against microsoft. In response to that, microsoft enforces the 100 day break. But most importantly it always clearly distinguishes the differences between FTE and contractors by not providing contractors with many benefits. Access to bathrooms and HVAC in the office and free soda/coffee I think are the only perks they get. So I predict that Microsoft will not revisit this for contractors, contractors will only get on the connector if their agencies chip in to cover the cost.