This past week I had a wonderful conversation with someone at the Florida Department of Transportation about their marketing and efforts on reducing the car load on our Orlando roads by encouraging carpooling, vanpooling, the upcoming SunRail, and the expansion of I-4. It sparked my interest enough that I have done a little homework on the subject for you.
Currently, there is a carpooling program with reThink that allows you to provide you home to work driving habits and they’ll match you with others who have similar schedules. There is also a vanpool program where you and 9 other people coming from the same area and working around the same area split the monthly rental cost and gas of a brand new van that you would get to use daily. Much cheaper than owning your own car!
I am excited about SunRail. Having been to Europe and seeing how rail-heavy everyone’s commutes are, but how easy it is to use and get from place to place, gave me assurance that I could also try to do this when SunRail comes. I imagine I’ll hop on a bus from somewhere on Edgewater in College Park, take the train from the Florida Hospital to the downtown Lynx station, and then hop on another bus that would take me straight to work. I hope it doesn’t take more than 45 minutes, though! My current commute is only fifteen minutes, so the only incentive I have is that I’ll feel greener.
That’s my only incentive until fall of 2014, however. Once the construction on I-4 starts, it’s going to displace a lot of cars trying to skirt around the mess. This will probably increase my commute to that half hour to forty minute mark just because of the extra cars on the road that would normally take I-4. And this will go on for six years! By then, I’ll be fully trained on commuting to work through bus and rail that maybe I’ll keep doing it. It will probably be cheaper than paying for the toll lanes that will have variable rates depending on the time of day and traffic conditions…
For more info on reThink, click here.
For more info on how reThink is going to try to get car sharing companies here so that we can still have access to cars when we need them, click here.
For more info on SunRail, click here.
For more info on the I-4 expansion, click here.
For more info on how Lynx is going to add vans as a tool to pick people up to get them to the train stations on demand, click here.
Patti is still learning 