Commute Friendly WNC

Your organization can help reduce transportation barriers to employment and educational opportunities.

You can help make Western North Carolina a place with less traffic congestion, better air quality, and safer streets for all.

What is Commute Friendly WNC?

It is a FREE workplace and campus certification program that helps employers and campuses provide support for multimodal commuting. That means carpooling, vanpooling, public transit, biking, walking, and even telework.

The program is a partnership between your organization and Go Mountain Commuting, who will act like extra support staff for your employees or students. Our aim is to connect them to transportation resources and education that make their commuting options simple.

The Commute Friendly WNC certification is both a recruitment tool and a bragging right. But it’s also a community of organizations who care about making Western North Carolina a place where we all want to live, work, learn, and play.

Why get certified as Commute Friendly?

Because it unlocks all of these FREE benefits of partnership with Go Mountain!

1. Creation of workplace or campus-specific outreach materials and resources. We’ll create tailored outreach materials for your employees or students. You can then have those materials available in your resource offices, new employee or new student orientations, or send out in emails and newsletters. Examples: A flyer for your public bathrooms, a brochure for your front desk, a digital sign for your on-site screens, graphics for your social media posts, or a PDF to include in your email blasts.
2. Tabling at your events or speaking at your functions, by request. Have an upcoming orientation, wellness fair, meeting, or retreat? We’re happy to commuter resources in any setting, and provide our expertise face-to-face with your employees or students.
3. Carpool matching services. Perfect for employees who live far from work, we can connect your employees who are interested in carpooling and match them with others whose routes and schedules align. Vanpools are also available in our region for employers who want to contribute to their employees commuter options.
4. Bicycle Commuting 101 lunch & learn for your workplace or campus. Do you want to encourage your employees, colleagues, or students to commute by bike, but not sure what they need to get started? This offering is a curriculum designed to teach everything a new bike commuter needs to know, packaged in a convenient one-hour timeframe.
5. Bus Ride-Alongs. This is a group activity designed to be fun and engaging, which teaches the participants how to use public transit in a relaxed, employer-supported setting. (Ex: ride the bus to lunch, to a board game cafe, or to happy hour!) We can start right from your workplace/campus and navigate to nearby amenities.
6. Creation of workplace or campus-specific commuter challenges. A commuter challenge is a great team-building tool to have a little friendly competition between your students, employees, or departments to see who can use multimodal transportation the most during a designated timeframe. You decide the parameters, we’ll help your people create accounts and track their stats.
7. Personalized commute-planning assistance for your employees or students. One-on-one help with bus schedules, bike routes, or resource navigation, for anyone who wants it. This helps remove uncertainty and make your people more confident in choosing multimodal transportation when it works for them.
8. Promotion as a Commute Friendly Workplace or Campus on our website and social media for collaborating in our programs. We’re in a lot of spaces with your peer organizations. And we love to hype up our Commute Friendly WNC participants!
9. Inclusion in the Commute Friendly WNC network. A community of like-minded orgs who are already certified, or who are interested in certification. We get together in person a few times a year to share ideas, resources, do site visits, and mingle.
10. Grant-writing assistance for multimodal amenities or multimodal plans (when available). Chances are, we’ll hear about commuter resources and grants before you do. If you’re enrolled, we’ll let you know any time one becomes available, and work with you to write the grant to improve your commuter offerings.

How to get certified

1. Fill out the application.
2. Participate in an on-site assessment and consultation with Go Mountain Commuting. This is where we’ll do a deep dive on the program benefits and transportation resources available to your people, and how we can collaborate to enhance those offerings.
3. Send out a site-wide commuter survey to all employees or students, designed by Go Mountain.
4. Promote the Commute Friendly WNC program on your storefront, social media, or to other employers, at least twice a year.
5. Recertify every other year to maintain your Commute Friendly status. You’ll receive reminders when it’s time.

Certification Levels

The workplace badges are shown below, but if you’re a college or university, your badge will say “campus” instead of workplace. You’ll receive one of these stickers for your storefront after you certify, if desired!

Points are determined through the application process. You don’t need to figure out your own certification level, we’ll do this together at the on-site consultation (which is step 2 above under “How to get certified”).

The points are based on what is available at your organization at the time of application, including: amenities, infrastructure, incentives, benefits, policies, culture, promotion, and education. The goal of the application is to quantify how well an organization supports its multimodal commuters, as well as how feasible it is to use multimodal transportation to access a workplace or campus.

Still have questions?

Head over to the application page for a few common questions and misconceptions. If you still have questions after reading through, please feel free to reach out to sandy@landofsky.org