Bike to work

The average commute at VAUDE is 14 kilometers. That adds up to over 1.3 million km of commuting annually (when the majority of the VAUDE team isn’t working from home because of Corona...).

Our goal is to reduce commutes involving one person alone in a car. We provide specific incentives for commuting by bike, carpool or bus with rewards from our Mobility Lotto program.

VAUDE reports on all harmful emissions in its annual climate audit. We offset all commuting emissions with climate protection projects. Read more about it here.

We have learned that employee mobility for business travel and commuting is one of the biggest causes of harmful emissions at our VAUDE headquarters. It is clear that we have an urgent need for action and we understand just how important corporate mobility management is.

Since 2012, VAUDE has worked intensively on the issue of commuting and mobility management – not least because parking spaces on the premises have become very scarce.

Instead of investing in more parking, VAUDE is relying on infrastructure and incentives for increasing the number of employees who bike commute (for the eco benefits and for the health benefits), come by bus or carpool to work. We have eliminated another 65 parking spaces during the office remodeling in recent years. In their place, we have designed a green campus with a climbing wall and state-of-the-art meeting rooms. Read more here.

The VAUDE Mobility Concept consists of several components to motivate our employees to be as environmentally friendly as possible. One of them is "Bike Commuting.”

A real bicycle garage, a repair workshop with an inner tube vending machine and tools, courses on riding technique and repairs, changing rooms and showers – we try to make cycling to work as appealing as possible for our employees.

In addition, and employee can use one of our company's own e-bikes free of charge. Employees' private e-bikes can also be "refueled" on site free of charge.

Since 2015, all VAUDE employees have been able to take advantage of the “JobRad” program in which the same tax code for company cars applies to bicycles and e-bikes. And it applies to all employees, regardless of their access to a company car. More than 170 VAUDE employees have used the program to acquire new, high-quality bikes for their daily commute – almost a quarter of our employees! This means that in 2019 for example we cycled over 80,000 kilometers to work – more than twice the distance around the earth.

In our hilly surroundings that are challenging even for ambitious cyclists, the biggest potential for energy and emissions savings comes from carpooling.

We reward carpools with carpool parking spaces right in front of the door, and of course with our mobility lottery.

Online carpooling platforms are helpful because you can offer fast, uncomplicated and free rides and find rides. The problem with these services in rural areas like Tettnang is to find a sufficient number of users so that trips can be arranged at all. With VAUDE employees alone, platforms such as these can’t function. We would therefore support the initiative for a regional platform.

We book coaches for traveling to trade fairs or larger VAUDE events.

The village of Obereisenbach near Tettnang, where the VAUDE company headquarters are located, has long been difficult to reach by public transport. VAUDE wasn’t willing to accept these conditions and therefore initiated a project – the Bähnlelinie.

On October 1, 2013 the Regional Transport Association Bodensee-Oberschwaben (bodo), with the support of the administrative district Bodenseekreis and a local bus company, established a commuter line that connects Obereisenbach to the nearest train station in Meckenbeuren as well as to Tettnang’s urban transport grid.

Since 2018, it now offers continuous hourly service between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., as well as perfect connections to the Tettnang city bus and the BOB train at Meckenbeuren station.

Most of our employees from the Tettnang area and even many of them from Friedrichshafen and Ravensburg are well connected by rail. We strongly encourage bus travel from the VAUDE side. The capacity utilization of the railway line is already quite good thanks to employees and residents. Nevertheless, considerably more employees could still use the bus, but the process of changing habits takes years....

We have set ourselves the goal of reducing our emissions from employee mobility by another 25 % by 2024 compared with 2019. How far have we come? Here is the answer.

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