Finding better commute solutions — together

Two months into California’s shelter-in-place order, Bay Area Equity Atlas released an analysis of data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research that helped describe the 1.1 million essential workers in the Bay Area. Comprising of about 28% of all workers in the region, women and workers of color are overrepresented, and this workforce has more economic and social vulnerabilities.

The daily grind of one Peninsula high school therapist particularly struck me while I was doing outreach for the social services organization, Manzanita Works. This essential worker super-commutes daily from Hollister — 60 miles and often as much as 2 1/2 hours each way — to get to work five days a week. He was willing to replace some use of his car with other transit options including a Caltrain GoPass to take the edge off the mental, physical and financial toll of a brutal commute. His patience with imperfect options stands out as if they are stepping stones to a healthier quality of life.

To help employers across all sectors find commute options for their teams, Manzanita Works manages a transit consortium: a group of employers who are in a relationship to purchase services together. Welcoming diverse employers to solve for varied job types together — without regard for ability to pay — has the likes of Google across the table from the Ravenswood City School District, JobTrain and Ravenswood Family Health Network. Meta and the city of Menlo Park both endorse the model, and the U.S. Geological Survey sees Manzanita informing its return-to-office approach and has completed its approval process to join. Poignantly, the lived experience of essential workers informs the organization’s pilots where, in addition to distributing Caltrain GoPasses, essential workers secured long-haul rides on tech shuttles and have e-bikes for first- and last-leg connections to transit on the way in Redwood City.

Like the modest yet resilient plant the organization is named after, Manzanita Works’ model for collective purchasing with social equity as a founding principle has applications for child care, housing and more. To be sure, changing commutes doesn’t undo or eliminate other workplace exploitation. Increasing the wages of this workforce and assigning a higher value to the role essential workers play in keeping us safe, healthy and cared for, is necessary and long overdue. Even still, inefficiencies exist in the private marketplace and public services, and there are underutilized resources that could subsidize our essential working families who continue to struggle under the weight of living expenses.

Accelerating to a post-pandemic reality, more of us are shedding our masks, returning to school, reentering offices and emerging to socialize in person from the feverish dream state of surviving these past two years. If we are open to incremental solutions while solving for the needs of essential workers, we will have the basis for transforming inefficient systems we all wrestle with. Let’s grow a new kind of relationship among our diverse workforce and craft a new “normal” to which we want to return.

Mila Zelkha is the CEO of Manzanita Works, a fiscally sponsored project of the nonprofit Philanthropic Ventures Foundation. Trained as an architect from Rhode Island School of Design, Mila is recipient of a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition and is a former Santa Clara County Roads Commissioner.