City employees could be paid to pedal to work if a plan to reduce car traffic in Madison gets traction.

Tom Klein, director of the Wisconsin Bike Federation for Dane County, said the city is considering giving employees a monetary incentive for biking or walking to work to promote healthier lifestyles and less congestion in Madison.

Ald. Mike Verveer, District 4, said the city has encouraged employees to use alternate forms of transportation rather than single occupancy vehicles for many years. According to Verveer, this bicycling proposal would be a “natural extension” of this policy.

“The city of Madison already provides its employees with free metro bus passes, and we have been doing that for many, many years now,” Verveer said. “We also encourage carpooling where we allow city employees to take city-owned fleet vehicles home with them if they drive other employees to and from work.”

In 2001, the Sustainable Madison Committee passed a resolution that paid employees to bike to work, committee member Raj Shukla said in an email to The Badger Herald. Shukla said the cost of the program was about the same as a personal computer, yet it was given a $1 million budget.

Shukla said the cost of such a program is not the biggest challenges that it would face. He said for this program to be effective, it needs to be clear to employees that biking will allow them to get from home to work in the quickest and most effective ways.

Klein said many city employees already ride their bicycles or take mass transit to work, so this proposal would just provide them with additional incentive for doing what they already do, especially now that it could give employees a “safety net” for parking spots in cases of bad weather, appointments or child illnesses.

According to Klein, there are only benefits possible from implementing such a policy. He said giving people the incentive to walk, bike or use mass transit in a city like Madison, where many jobs are so geographically close, will decrease traffic congestion.

“According to research, when an employer encourages biking or walking in the form of transportation to work, they are less likely to take sick days, are more productive and there will be less congestion in and around the area that the employees are working,” he said.

However, Shukla said he does not believe a monetary incentive to reimburse employees biking to work for mileage will be all that effective.

Shukla said the Sustainable Madison Committee is continuing to encourage multiple transportation alternatives for employees within the greater Madison area.

Similar bike incentive plans have proven most successful in San Francisco, Klein said.

In some of these municipalities, cities have set aside money for this incentive by having the employees sell their parking spaces at the market rate, Klein said.  He said in Madison, these types of spaces that employees could sell to non-employees are highly valued and would be enough to cover the cost of the incentive.

“I think this is an idea worth considering and pursuing,” Verveer said. “The idea as I understand it is very much in its infancy. It’s an idea that has been talked about by members of one city committee, so the proposal still has a long way to go.”