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Rebecca Mills is a big train fan.
Mills, a visual team lead at the Patagonia in downtown Palo Alto, has been taking Caltrain from Redwood City since she joined the store two years ago. Initially, she paid her own way by loading her Clipper card with money. Then, like many of her store colleagues, she learned that she could get free train passes through the Palo Alto Transportation Management Association, a local nonprofit that for the past decade has been trying to get downtown commuters to ditch their cars and adopt other modes of transportation.
Train commuting, she noted, isn’t always smooth. The Caltrain schedule can be less than ideal and trains can run late.
“But I love that I don’t have to deal with traffic every day and there are a lot of days when we have coworkers call and say, ‘I’ve been stuck at this light for 20 minutes, I’m going to be late for work.’ And I’m like, ‘I made it to work on time,'” she said.
Patagonia is one of the city’s top participating companies in Palo Alto TMA, which offers free transit passes to local workers who qualify based on their income. Over the past four years, the nonprofit has seen significant changes in leadership, board members, the number of participants and program offerings. With the City Council now reviewing the budget for the coming fiscal year, one of the questions that council members are grappling with is whether – and to what extent – the city should keep supporting the nonprofit. The nonprofit, for its part, is eyeing further changes, with plans to expand to other sections of the city.
It’s easy to see why Patagonia employees like the benefits that the nonprofit provides. The store is located on Alma Street, adjacent to the Caltrain tracks and a block from the second-busiest Caltrain station in the transit agency’s entire network. The employees’ hours are fairly regular, which makes train commuting a reasonable option for most, particularly on weekdays. And riding a train or a bus is both cheaper than driving – since Caltrain and the city are footing the bill – and better for the environment.
Ben Madison, a warehouse team lead at Patagonia, said he used to drive to work from San Jose, which he jokes typically took between 30 and 130 minutes. When he joined the store five years ago, employees with cars had to either spend money to park at the Caltrain lot or run out to re-park their cars two or three times per day to comply with downtown’s parking regulations.
“That was a big thing when I started. We’ve got to know when everyone needs to move their cars and plan for that. Sometimes you don’t get your break because the break is just moving your car,” Madison said.
Madison’s car commute dropped once he moved to Redwood City, though he said he still would leave the house about 40 minutes before his shift to account for possible construction delays. Now, he can leave 20 minutes before his shift and get to work on time by riding Caltrain.
He is in the majority. Twelve store employees now get train or bus passes through the Palo Alto TMA, more than two-thirds of the store’s workforce. According to the nonprofit’s newly released annual report, only three Palo Alto companies had more participants in 2023: the Sheraton (29), the Westin Hotel (19) and Nobu Hotel (15).
“Once they know about it, most people are usually eager to get on board,” Madison said, as a Caltrain train passed by behind him and tooted its horn, seemingly in confirmation.
Nathan Duncan, general manager of Patagonia, said that in addition to making the commute experience easier, the store’s transit-first ethos brings his team closer to the downtown community. Employees who take transit are more likely to linger and enjoy downtown amenities – an ice cream, an affogato, a quick trip to Trader Joe’s – and the mood when they get home tends to be better when they didn’t spend their commute sitting in traffic, he said.
Store employees often get hooked up with bus or train passes shortly after they start, he said.
“You are still getting to know the door code to the back of the house, but you know the train schedule and you build your schedule around it,” Duncan said.
Duncan isn’t just an enthusiastic participant in Palo Alto TMA’s programs. He is also one of two of the newest board members for the nonprofit, which has been trying to get commuters to ditch their cars since 2014.
When the nonprofit made its debut, traffic concerns were all the rage at City Hall and downtown’s parking situation was routinely described in apocalyptic terms. Responding to popular demand – and a memo from four council members — the City Council created the Palo Alto TMA and charged it with reducing single-occupancy vehicle trips by 30% within three years. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, its mission has somewhat shifted. (So, incidentally, has its mission statement, which shrank from four long sentences to four words: “Better commutes for everyone.”).
Unlike other transportation management associations, Palo Alto TMA does not focus on a particular business park or employment district. Once largely confined to downtown, it now also provides transit passes to workers in the California Avenue area and, most recently, along El Camino Real and in Stanford Shopping Center.
Justine Burt, executive director of the Palo Alto TMA, said the organization has distributed 16 transit passes to employees of various El Camino establishments, including f*cki Sushi, Honey Baked Ham and the Montessori school, and 26 to employees at the Stanford mall. The transit passes are available to workers with annual incomes of $70,000 or less and the TMA conducts regular audits to make sure the workers who receive them are using the passes as intended.
Burt said she sees the shopping center as a particularly promising opportunity for expansion – a chance to both give workers new options for subsidized commuting and to free up parking at the mall’s lots and garages.
“It’s right across the street for transit? What can be better to try to shift people?” Burt said.
Its path ahead is, however, anything but smooth. Unlike other transportation management associations that get most of their funding from major employers and property owners, the Palo Alto TMA relies heavily on public funds. It now has an annual budget of about $200,000, down from a pre-pandemic level of $750,000. Over the past year, the agency had relied on funds that had been unspent during the Covid years. This has allowed Palo Alto TMA to spend about $340,000 annually to support local employees.
By contrast, the transportation management association at Stanford Research Park has spent $372,000 in the last year just to get all research park employees free rides on Palo Alto Link, the city’s nascent rideshare program. The Research Park TMA, which benefits from Stanford’s largess, also runs shuttles and administrates carpool programs for district employees. During the pandemic, as transit agencies struggled, it opened The Hub, a transit-friendly gathering place that includes a Coupa Cafe and a Mike’s Bikes.
The Palo Alto TMA has far fewer resources. Though a few employers, including Patagonia, have kicked in $1,000 contributions, the agency continues to rely largely on the kindness of transit agencies and council members. During the pandemic, Caltrain donated a few hundred transit passes to promote ridership at a time when its passenger count dropped by more than 90%. For other types of transit passes, the TMA has been relying on city funding.
Its annual report shows an agency on the rebound after the pandemic swoon. The number of transit passes that it had activated dropped from more than 250 in February 2020 to fewer than 50 in April 2020. By December 2023, it had returned to pre-pandemic levels. Justine Burt noted that it had achieved the restoration despite having only 26% of the budget that it had before the pandemic.
Transit passes aren’t the only arrow in the TMA’s quiver. The agency also has two bike programs. One, called Bike Love, is an app that allows participants to get daily $5 rewards if they bike to work. Another program, which the Palo Alto TMA administers in partnership with Bike Exchange, provides bikes and bike-safety equipment to local employees.
To expand these services and distribute more transit passes, the TMA is asking the city to contribute an additional $200,000 to its budget, raising it to $400,000. The City Council will decide next month, when it approves the 2025 budget, to what extent city funds should continue to support the nonprofit.
Early feedback from council members has been mostly positive. The council’s Finance Committee received Palo Alto TMA’s annual report in late April and largely liked what it saw.
Committee Chair Pat Burt (no relation to Justine), who serves on the board of both Caltrain and the VTA, observed during its April 23 meeting that transit agencies today are really scrambling to get people back on transit.
“We need that in order for the transit agencies to survive and thrive,” he said.
In addition to the regional benefits, a robust TMA could help the city address local transportation problems. The council’s Sustainability and Climate Action Plan sets a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions relating to transportation by at least 65% from the 1990s levels, which would require more cycling, more transit use and a broad switch from gas to electric vehicles.
Palo Alto is also now updating its bike master plan, which will serve as a blueprint for expanding the city’s network of bike boulevards and addressing dangerous intersections. Having a nonprofit that assists employees who may otherwise have a hard time affording bikes and transit passes certainly won’t hurt.
The city’s more immediate focus is on El Camino Real, where the state Department of Transportation is now advancing a plan to remove parking spaces and install bike lanes. With some businesses raising concerns about losing parking, Pat Burt suggested that the city can blunt the impact by buying and distributing VTA passes to employees along El Camino, thus giving them an alternative to driving.
With low-income workers eligible for passes that cost about $100 per year, the city can invest in and distribute about 100 such passes for the relatively low investment of $10,000.
“That can be a big component of being able to support those businesses on El Camino that might be harmed and that might otherwise be opponents to the bike lane plan that we’re looking at,” Burt said.
His two committee colleagues, Vice Mayor Ed Lauing and council member Vicki Veenker concurred and suggested placing Palo Alto TMA’s request for an additional $200,000 into its “parking lot,” a list of items that the full council will evaluate before it adopts the budget in June.
If it gets the funding it needs, the Palo Alto TMA hopes to spend the next few years reaching out to more businesses, grow its number of Bike Love users and forge stronger relationships with like-minded nonprofits such as Friends of Caltrain, Seamless Bay Area and the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, according to its strategic plan. It wants to expand its educational offerings to prospective cyclists, develop a lending program for e-bikes; and test new mobility-as-a-service apps that allow riders to plan trips that require multiple transit services. It also wants to expand to Channing House, a residential community for seniors in downtown Palo Alto.
Justine Burt noted that Channing House employees about 150 people, many of whom currently drive and would love another alternative.
“We’d like to go citywide,” Justine Burt said. “Our goal could be to provide more people with information and incentives. Those are our tools: information and incentives.”
