Results from the Sustainability Committee Commuting Poll

© ASTRON / JIVE / NOVA

In a recent (2019) inventory of total CO2 emission from ASTRON/JIVE/NOVA, it was found that a fair fraction (~46%) of the emission can be attributed to our commuting. That is not totally unexpected, as our office is situated in a rural area of The Netherlands. There are poor public transport opportunities, and most of our employees live at a fairly large distance from the institute and commute by car. And as most cars are still gasoline powered cars, this adds quite some emission.

As ASTRON has pledged to lower its carbon footprint by 50% in 2025, the sustainability committee has been asked by the ASTRON management to help raise awareness of the impact commuting has on this, and to come with suggestions to help lower the emission caused by our commuting.

As a first step in this, a questionnaire was prepared in which we requested all employees to fill in their current commuting behavior and their ideas about possibly changing that behavior. A majority (132) of employees has filled in the questionnaire, which resulted in a nice dataset of the current line of thinking of ASTRON/NOVA/JIVE employees.

Some of the main conclusions from the poll are the following:

• Flexibility and travel time are the most important factors for choosing a preferred means of transport; environmental friendliness turned out to be the least important.

• Only a relatively small fraction of employees is willing or considering a switch to an electric vehicle in the coming few years.

• More than half of the responders indicate to be interested in a shuttle service connecting to a local station/hub.

• Likewise, a majority indicated that access to an electrical powered bike or scooter to a nearby train station would be an option to consider.

These results will help shape the discussions we would like to have with you in the coming months. Even if we could lower emissions caused by commuting by 10%, only, this is still quite a gain worth investing in.