There’s a great article on Kiplinger.com about how getting employees out of their cars can actually be good for business.  The article sites a bunch of businesses that are encouraging employees to use sustainable transportation and some of the great results.

Some of the findings:

• Over the last few years, Cisco tested its Virtual Office telecommuting technology on more than 12,000 employees worldwide — roughly 20% of staff. The results: Auto emissions fell by 30,435 tons annually and Cisco saved more than $168,000 that would have gone to buy carbon offsets.
• Easier worker commutes can fatten bottom lines. An internal survey at Sun Microsystems, for example, shows that workers gave 60% of the time they saved commuting back to the company. In gridlocked regions throughout the country, that could add up to an extra hour each day, per telecommuter.

• Phil Winters, transportation demand management program director at the National Center for Transit Research at the University of South Florida, says the cost to hire and retrain new staff and increase productivity to the level of the worker being replaced can be up to 1.5 times a worker’s annual salary.

Good stuff.  Read the article here: Driving a Low-Carbon Commute.

A kind reader sends along this plug (pun intended) for a special event tomorrow:

On Thursday afternoon (October 23), on the campus of the University of Michigan, several leaders in the areas of automotive research, public policy, venture capital and business will be coming together to discuss the prospects for plug-in electric vehicles, and what they might mean for the future of Michigan.

The program, called TechKnow Forum 2008: ReCharging Michigan, is scheduled to run from 3:00 to 7:00 PM at the University’s Power Center and will include such notable guests as

• John Deniston, Partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,
• David Cole, Chairman of the Center for Automotive Research,
• Nancy Gioia, Director of Sustainable Mobility Technologies and Hybrid Vehicle Programs at Ford Motor Company,
• David Kiley, Senior Correspondent at Business Week,
• several noted U-M faculty members,
• and many others at the forefront of the movements to bring plug-in hybrids to market, and build an electricity infrastructure (smart grid) robust enough to make it possible.

A full list of participants can be found here, and tickets are available online

More information can be found at the Michigan Messenger.

If anyone goes and would like to blog about it for the getDowntown blog, just email me at info@getdowntown.org

We are very happy to see that the getDowntown blog made the list of top Ann Arbor Blogs according to outside.in

And we are in good company, along with The Ann Arbor Chronicle, Mark Maynard, Vacuum, and Arbor Update.

Congrats to all!