Is Atlanta's traffic solution a 3-day weekend?
Top state officials consider offering tax credit for alternatives to reduce traffic
Atlanta Business Chronicle - April 6, 2007by Ryan Mahoney Staff writer
Two top state lawmakers believe the solution to Atlanta's congestion may be a three-day weekend.
They want as many metro area employers as possible to consider having their workers come in just four days a week -- or nine days every two weeks -- working an extra hour or two each day to make up for the time off.
Their theory is that if enough employers sign on to these "flexible" or "compressed" workweeks, enough cars might be removed from Atlanta highways during rush hour to make a noticeable dent in commuting times.
The pair -- Earl Ehrhart of Powder Springs and Vance Smith of PineMountain, Republicans chairing two of the most influential committees in the Georgia House of Representatives -- were persuaded to pursue the issue by Dwight Brown, CEO of Cobb Electric Membership Corp., which has run a flex week program since 1982.
They plan to test out the idea with the state's 100,000 employees, nearly 17,000 of whom already use flex weeks under a mandate from Gov. Sonny Perdue.
"With the size of the state workforce," Ehrhart said, "we could really do something about congestion."
If the experiment works, incentives could follow to help local governments and private companies adopt flex weeks too.
The legislators' interest in flex weeks follows Georgia's 2006 move to become the first state offering tax credits for teleworking (up to $1,200 per employee), another alternative to the traditional workweek that may mitigate traffic.
Experts say the idea of a flexible workweek dates back to post-World War II Germany, when manufacturers in the rebuilding nation were looking for ways to get more out of their operations.
Flex weeks remain more prevalent in Europe than America, although a 2005 report by the Society for Human Resource Management found a third of all U.S. employers offer them.
Nearly 12,000 of the state's flex week workers are in the corrections and juvenile justice departments, with another thousand in the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) -- a fifth of the department's payroll.
Melany Reynolds, who coordinates GDOT's program with the Clean Air Campaign, said employees love having a day off during the week to run errands, visit the doctor or take care of business that can't be done on weekends.
Workers also save gas money, said Elham Shirazi, a Los Angeles-based consultant. And they get in earlier or leave later due to their longer hours, avoiding peak rush times.
Employers like flex weeks because they can extend their hours of operation without adding more staff, making their workers more accessible to customers. Since flex week employees still spend their working hours in the office, they may remain more productive than teleworkers, who must overcome distractions at home.
In addition, flex weeks can save some employers thousands of dollars. Punch-clock maker Lathem Time Corp. adopted them in 2001 and is now able to shut down its plant on Fridays with no loss in production.
Brown, who laid out Cobb EMC's flex week system for Ehrhart and Smith about a month ago, said half of his employees are in the program, working 10 hours a day, four days a week.
Workers rotate which weekday they take off every quarter -- one group might be off Mondays for three months, then Tuesdays for the next three -- so only 20 percent of the workforce is out at any given time.
"The employees are very happy with it," Brown said. "If we could just get the government and some of the businesses downtown doing this, you could take a lot of vehicles off the road every day."
Flex weeks aren't perfect. They are designed for people who put in a set 40 hours a week -- meaning professionals who work longer or haphazard hours usually aren't eligible. And during a national holiday, or in an emergency situation, all bets are off.
It's also hard to schedule company meetings or get a group together to work on a project, said Nate Bennett, a Georgia Tech management professor who studied flex weeks for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, which ultimately dumped its program.
Plus, many Atlantans use major roads to run errands on their days off, so the effect on traffic may not be substantial.
"Reducing congestion is a laudable goal," Bennett said. "But it isn't clear to me that going to a [flex week] necessarily accomplishes it."
Ehrhart and Smith hope to challenge that assertion over the summer with a five-member panel of state lawmakers who will study the concept. Their findings could become law in 2008.
Flex weeks
Thousands of workers are already using them, including:
17,000 at the state of Georgia
225 at Cobb Electric Membership Corp.
90 at Lathem Time Corp.