What’s black and gold and commutes an estimated 571,122 miles per day? The people that learn, teach and work at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Which means: How they commute is pretty important.

David Cook, alternative transportation manager at CU, mentioned at a recent meeting of Boulder-area transportation managers the total mileage that he estimates students, faculty and staff at his university commute on a daily basis: nearly 600,000 miles.

The good news is that he also estimates that only about 16% of people at CU commute via single-occupancy vehicle. That means that most of the rest make their way to CU via carpool, bus, bike or on foot.

“We do a survey, not every year, but it’s a tracking survey that we use in relation to our Ecopass program,” Cook said. The survey has been conducted about eight times during the last 10 years. The most recent stats are from a survey conducted in November 2005.

“I was able to pull out the commute length by transportation mode, the average length of commute for single-occupancy vehicle, for walking, biking, taking the bus,” Cook said. The database could be a great learning tool for CU and other employers.

There are plenty of numbers to pore over — but rather than geek out, we figured we’d post some percentages here, then elaborate over in the forum.

According to Cook, of the 35,394 CU students, faculty and staff who commute:

• 40% take the bus
• 20% walk
• 17% bike
• 16% drive alone
• 4% carpool
• The remainder telecommute or marked “other” on their surveys.

We’ve asked Cook to post in the comments some suggestions he has for other employers trying to gauge and cut their own carbon footprints.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 9:27 am and is filed under CU, Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.