Kansas City – with its heartland, river-based location in the center of the U.S. – is an excellent hub for transportation and logistics companies. As the region continues to attract more freight-based businesses, it’s important to keep KC’s workforce connected and thriving by providing better access to jobs.

Industrial hubs are being built across the region, both within the urban core and along the outskirts of the metro.  In many cases, transit lines do not match employees’ shifts, or the hubs are not being built on transit lines at all. As a result, transportation is often cited by businesses as a major factor behind employee turnover. Employees and employers alike have expressed a need for more flexible transportation options.

To help fill these gaps, vanpooling offers one of the most cost-effective transportation and commuting solutions available today. Vanpooling allows groups of coworkers who live near one another to save time and money by commuting to work together each day. Coworkers can form a vanpool group through services like Commute with Enterprise, which provides a newer-model van or SUV and splits the monthly rental cost among the participants.

These programs are popular for the convenience and cost efficiency they provide commuters, and are perceived as a valuable employee benefit for both economic and social reasons:

• Money: For an average commute of 80 miles per day, ridesharing saves individuals up to $8,700 per year by reducing the cost of tolls, gas, vehicle maintenance and depreciation.

• Time: With no need to focus on driving, the average vanpool passenger gets nearly two hours (106 minutes) of time back each day to read, email, nap, shop online, talk, watch TV and more.

• Safety: Vanpools have proven to be the safest mode of public transportation when compared to motor bus, light rail, heavy rail, commuter rail and demand response services.1

• Stress: Vanpoolers’ stress levels have been shown to decrease more than 20 percent compared to commuters who drive their own vehicles to and from work.2

• Access: Vanpools are a low-cost way to expand public transit options outside metropolitan areas.

Several employers in the Kansas City area are currently are taking advantage of Commute with Enterprise, which is supported by the extensive Enterprise Rent-A-Car neighborhood network – delivering a level of fleet flexibility and local service unmatched in the vanpool industry.

Commute with Enterprise strongly complements the benefits and services of RideshareKC, a publicly funded program that helps individuals find alternative commute opportunities and assists employers with transportation programs. In addition, Commute with Enterprise partners with RideKC Vanpool to make vanpooling more cost-effective and flexible for employees.

It’s an exciting time for Enterprise to be working with Kansas City transit officials to find ways to expand our vanpooling services to provide even more sustainable mobility options for its local workforce.  We look forward to bringing more services to the Kansas City market to help deliver workers safely to work and home again every day.

Commute with Enterprise is a service of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car brand, which is owned by Enterprise Holdings Inc., the world’s largest car rental provider. To learn more about Commute with Enterprise, visit www.commutewithenterprise.com.

1.     U.S. Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics 1990–2014 data (Table 2-33: Transit Safety Data by Mode for All Reported Accidents).

2.     Ditmore, C. (2015). “Former vRide employee - A Comparative Analysis of Vanpool and Single Occupant Commuters’ Self-Reported Stress Level Before and After the Commute.” University of Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska. https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/xmlui/handle/11122/6529.