UM to offer employees an Economical Commute

ose Candelaria and his wife, Edith, estimate that they each save about $400 a month on gas by taking public transportation instead of driving to work.

Each morning, the two West Kendall residents, employees at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, park their SUVs in the Dadeland North parking garage and hop aboard Metrorail for the 15-minute commute to the Miami Health District.

“We would easily be spending $100 a week on gas if we didn’t take the train,” says Candelaria, a health claims administrator in the Miller School’s Benefits Administration office.

Soon, their daily commute will become even more cost-effective.

The University of Miami will launch on June 1 a new program that will offer employees either free or significantly discounted monthly transportation passes for Miami-Dade Transit buses, Metrorail, the Tri-Rail commuter train, and transfers.

The program is aimed at providing UM employees relief from surging gas prices at the pump while also reducing air pollution and traffic congestion.

“This initiative is consistent with two top goals of the University: helping faculty and staff cope with the high cost of living in South Florida and promoting environmentally sensitive programs in all that we do,” says Joe Natoli, senior vice president for business and finance and chief financial officer.

Here is how the program works: faculty and staff members who earn more than $35,000 a year but less than $100,000 can sign up to get a monthly public transportation pass for half the current cost. For employees who earn less than $35,000 a year, the monthly passes are free. Under the same salary structure, employees can also sign up to receive either free or discounted parking at Metrorail surface lots and parking garages. But employees cannot obtain the free or discounted passes and still retain their campus-parking permits.

University of Miami students can also sign up for the program but will receive public transportation and Metrorail parking passes at a discounted rate only.

The program is not available to employees at the new University of Miami Hospital, where parking is free.

Miller School employees can sign up for the program by visiting http://ummcsd.med.miami.edu/SECURITY/Transit_Pass.htm. Coral Gables and Rosenstiel School employees can enroll by visiting www.miami.edu/hr, clicking on the Human Resources Forms link, and scrolling to the Transit Pass Election Form.

By instituting the program, UM joins a growing number of universities and corporations that offer reduced and fare-free transit passes to their workers.

UM officials hope the program, when instituted, will help ease parking congestion on both the Coral Gables and Miller School campuses.

On the Miller School campus, parking is especially a challenge, as officials there faced a quandary: addressing the high cost of parking while freeing up more parking spaces for patients as the school’s clinical enterprise continues to grow.

“Reducing the cost of parking wasn’t going to solve it all,” says Paul Hudgins, associate vice president of medical human resources. “We realized that we needed to look at a way of making public transportation an incentive that would address not only the cost of parking but also traffic and parking congestion, the wear and tear on your vehicle, and the price of gas.”

So Hudgins, along with Tony Artrip, executive director of public safety at the Miller School, devised a public transportation plan to address those issues. About 1,100 Miller School employees already travel to work via Metrorail, and Hudgins and Artrip hope the new program will spur other workers to do the same.

“It’s not a solution for everyone,” Hudgins says, “and we understand that. But it’s a step, and we’re going to continue to look at this over time.”