Thanks to vigorous growth, Seattle Children’s was looking at a major expansion of its facilities. That meant a pressing need to collect all appropriate parking fees; encourage and reward alternative commutes via public transportation, carpool, vanpool, bike or walk; and accurately capture data on actual use and trends in order to fulfill goals set out in the hospital’s Transportation Management Plan. Seattle Children’s was using a variety of on-campus and offsite parking combined with a fleet of 18 shuttles to meet employee transportation needs.

It was a problematic system. Offsite parking lacked gates or other mechanized controls, so capturing actual parking activity and assessing charges was difficult – and required a tedious data-entry system on the backend. Discrepancies between pledged parking and carpool activity and actual use resulted in lost parking revenue and less incentive for employees to use alternate modes of transport. Without real-time feedback and data, employees had little built-in accountability for transportation choices and little incentive to change their commute behavior.

“We knew what was missing,” says Director of Transportation Paulo Nunes-Ueno. “Goose was willing to innovate, coming up with a comprehensive solution for us that brought this really complex and inaccurate system into harmony.” Before working with Goose, employees would pre-report their commute plans. For each pay period, they were charged parking fees for those days they pledged to drive and park, and were given commute bonuses for days they pledged to use alternative transportation.

One of the most critical aspects of the new system was the change from this static, manual system to one with the flexibility to capture employees’ actual behavior, and thus actual charges, on a daily basis. Goose uses hardware to collect commuter activity as it happens and software to track and analyze that activity in the Goose Commute Management Platform to meet Children’s goals.

Goose designed and installed hardware on the Seattle Children’s shuttle buses to read badge swipes as each rider boards and apply parking charges based on the location and time of the boarding. Linked back-end tools convert data captured by the shuttle and gate card readers to parking charges which are fed automatically to payroll for Children’s employees. Transportation managers use predefined reports to monitor parking and shuttle ridership patterns.

The Goose Commute Management Platform also runs and hosts the hospital’s transportation services website, allowing employees to plan and check their actual commute activity with attractive, interactive web-based tools.

Since implementation of the Goose Commuter Management platform, the hospital has experienced a 25 percent increase in the number of employees paying for parking. The ability to accurately measure commuter activity generated $1.2 million in increased revenue for Seattle Children’s in just the first six months of the program.

In place of drivers manually recording 1,000+ daily shuttle boardings, shuttle use and relative charges are automatically captured and collected through onboard electronic card readers. The hospital has seen an 8 percent drop in parking demand since implementing the Goose Commute Management System.