Is smart mobility the new slow food ?

The new parking lot will create 611 additional free-of-charge parking spaces (for a maximum of 24 consecutive hours). Many voices echo that this is not good enough : if you expand tremendously in one area you also need to ensure that most of the people working and living in that area, have the possibility to park their car.

While there are many arguments favoring that position, it raises the question on how one can offer parking spaces for several big companies in any given zone. Would we really be interested in creating x-thousand parking spaces ? What would the inhabitants think of huge abandoned parking lots—empty, once nighttime arrives ? Do we want ghost-cities during the nights ? What would it do to the traffic situation on the motorways in the mornings ? How would it affect the access to these areas ?

It is important that we change our mindset, both as employers as well as individuals. There is no chance that a country as small as Luxembourg will be able to cater for parking spaces at favorable prices for an ever increasing employment rate—regardless of whether the employees are cross-border workers or Luxembourg residents. Although this is easier said than done, we need to pursue alternative means of transport.
It is a fact that the current public transportation infrastructure has not developed as fast as the various commercial zones, so that initially our country will see short-term fixes and makeshift solutions to bridge the period where public transport is sub-optimal. There are several other solutions to rely on :

• Car-pooling for one, which might even result in favorable conditions on the motorway in the coming years—by means of using the emergency lane.
• Working from home some hours—i.e. flextime solutions or even working from home a day or two a month.

These are still makeshift solutions, but as demographics and people’s preferences change, it is also our responsibility as employers to help accommodate our talents’ wishes and their needs.

By Tom Pfeiffer, CSR and Sustainability Leader at Deloitte