Welcome to PandaPod; Ridepanda's video podcast where we explore how people get to work and move through cities, from transportation demand management and reducing parking, to biking, sustainability, and the future of urban mobility. In each episode, we go straight to an expert to hear about their experience, get their perspective, and learn from their advice. For our debut episode, we sat down with someone who has spent nearly three decades building things at one of the most complex commute environments in the country. Watch the whole episode now!!
John Chernowski is the Senior Manager of Transportation and Parking Demand Management at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), a U.S. Department of Energy national lab affiliated with the University of California. With nearly three decades at the lab, John has moved through an unusually diverse career: radioactive waste management in the mid-1990s, risk and assurance programs, LBNL's first corporate governance office, and eventually, seven years ago, a call from the Chief Operating Officer to "solve our parking problem."
Today, John oversees transportation and parking demand management for a campus of roughly 3,000 employees and affiliates, 1,600 parking spaces, and a set of structural constraints, (free parking, a hilltop location, and distance from public transit), that would give any TDM professional pause. His job is to meet those challenges without the levers most programs rely on.
John's entry into TDM was, in his words, "a windy road." His first role at LBNL was in radioactive waste management. He built the lab's first corporate governance office. He managed safety and assurance for the facilities division. None of it was transportation. Then the COO came calling.
"Solve our parking problem." Those were the words that launched his TDM career. At the time, LBNL's parking supply was shrinking due to an ongoing campus revitalization that demolishes older buildings to make way for new facilities ahead of the lab's 100th anniversary. The straightforward response would have been to build more parking. Instead, John took a different path: reduce demand.
That framing, reduce demand rather than expand supply, is the philosophical foundation of everything John has built over the last seven years. It's an approach that demands creativity, community buy-in, and a willingness to play the long game. For TDM professionals who've found their way into the discipline through similarly circuitous routes, John's story will feel familiar: the best transportation managers are often the ones who came from somewhere else and brought a fresh set of problem-solving tools with them.
Most TDM programs have at least one natural advantage they can build on. Things like proximity to transit, a campus layout that supports cycling, or the ability to price parking to disincentivize driving. At LBNL, John is working without all three.
He laid out what he calls the three-headed challenge:
John's insight is that these three constraints are interlinked and mutually reinforcing, but that each one, with the right tool, can be addressed. The shuttle solves the first mile. The ebike solves the hill. Community advocacy solves the politics of asking for budget without being able to point to parking revenue.
Remarkably, despite a shrinking parking supply, demand has stayed well below capacity. On a recent peak demand day, over 300 spaces were sitting empty. Real proof that people are finding other ways to get there.
When LBNL first launched its partnership with Ridepanda to offer employer-subsidized ebike leases, John wasn't sure what to expect. The lab's terrain is steep and its roads are narrow. The national car-centric culture is a real headwind. And getting people to try something new, (especially something they might not have done since childhood ), takes more than just making it available.
Two things drove the growth: regular test ride events on campus and consistent promotion in the lab's employee newsletter, "Elements." John sees the test ride as critical. It lowers the barrier for employees who are curious but hesitant, giving them a no-commitment way to experience what an ebike actually feels like. Many riders who had never considered cycling as a commute option found themselves leasing a bike within weeks of their first test ride.
John also shared that LBNL benefits from a unique cultural tailwind: a large employee and affiliate population from Europe, where cycling as transportation is far more normalized. This creates, as he put it, "fertile ground" for TDM initiatives that might face more friction at a company with a more homogenous, car-dependent workforce. It's a reminder that program design is only part of the equation. Understanding your community's starting point is just as important.
Looking ahead, John is also exploring the possibility of deploying Ridepanda ebikes as on-site transportation, a potential replacement for the fleet of over 100 "Gem" golf carts currently used primarily by senior management to move around the campus. It's an elegant solution: replace expensive, space-consuming single-occupancy vehicles with ebikes, and extend the program's benefits deeper into the daily life of the lab.
One of the most practical takeaways from John's conversation was his insight on peer testimonials. His outreach team ran a simple experiment: instead of promoting the Ridepanda program through institutional messaging, they interviewed a "Ridepanda super user," a colleague who had made the switch and loved it, and ran the story in the lab's newsletter.
The results spoke for themselves. Employees hearing about a real commute experience from a peer they recognize, dealing with the same hills, the same commute, the same skepticism they started with, is categorically more persuasive than hearing that message from a transportation manager. The credibility gap between "the program says it's great" and "my colleague says it changed their commute" is enormous.
John described this as a "flywheel": word-of-mouth generates curiosity, curiosity generates test rides, test rides generate leases, and leasees become the next round of testimonials. The loop compounds over time, and it's largely self-sustaining once it gets going. For TDM programs looking for a replicable outreach strategy, this is it: find your early adopters, tell their stories, and let the community do the rest.
For TDM professionals in institutional settings, budget conversations are a perennial challenge. Without parking revenue and without a direct line to the P&L, transportation programs often have to make their case indirectly. John has developed a two-track approach that has proven effective at LBNL.
Track one: demonstrate value to senior management. When John wanted to replace aging shuttle stop signs with real-time display monitors, he didn't ask for the full rollout budget upfront. Instead, he funded and installed a single monitor near the executive offices, somewhere leadership would see it every day. Once they experienced the "before and after" firsthand, the case for funding the remaining monitors essentially made itself. It's a classic "foot in the door" strategy, and it works.
Track two: let the community speak. LBNL runs surveys of its employee community, and John uses those results as a direct pipeline to the budget conversation. When the community survey came back with requests for covered bike parking, John brought those requests directly to management. The message shifted from "the TDM office wants this" to "your employees are asking for this," a subtle but important distinction that changes the political dynamics entirely.
Both tracks share a common thread: evidence. John isn't asking for trust; he's asking for a decision supported by data. That's a posture that resonates in any institutional environment and it's a playbook any TDM manager can adapt.
John's biggest strategic ambition for the coming years is one of the more creative TDM concepts we've heard: decoupling LBNL's shuttle system into two distinct services.
Currently, LBNL operates an integrated shuttle that handles both off-site access (connecting the lab to BART and surrounding communities) and on-site circulation (moving people between buildings on the lab's hilly, winding roads). The problem: a shuttle optimized for access needs to be large and scheduled; a shuttle optimized for on-site circulation needs to be small, nimble, and frequent. Trying to do both with the same vehicle and route architecture is a compromise that serves neither goal particularly well.
John's vision is to separate the two systems entirely. An access shuttle connecting the lab to transit and communities below would run on a reliable schedule with appropriate-sized vehicles. A dedicated on-site circulator, (smaller, more frequent, capable of navigating narrow roads), would replace a fleet of over 100 "Gem" vehicles (glorified golf carts at $50,000+ per lifecycle) that currently serve as the primary on-site transport for senior management.
The equity dimension of this vision is worth noting: Gems are primarily accessible to senior leadership, while the circulator would serve everyone. It's a modest infrastructure change with a meaningful cultural implication. Getting around the campus is a shared resource, not a management perk.
It's the kind of systems-level thinking that characterizes John's approach throughout the conversation: look at the whole problem, find the constraint, and redesign around it.
Seeing real change in commuting behavior and championing bike infrastructure. Watching the Ridepanda program grow has been genuinely exciting for John. And there’s something deeply satisfying about riding the shuttle himself and experiencing firsthand the infrastructure he helped build. After years of advocating for it, he gets to live it every week.
Maintaining parking equilibrium at LBNL. The lab’s ongoing revitalization program has steadily reduced the number of available parking spaces, yet parking demand has stayed well below capacity throughout. On a recent peak demand day, over 300 spaces were still available. That outcome doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of years of sustained investment in shuttle service, ebike programming, carpool incentives, and consistent community outreach. For John, it’s the clearest evidence that TDM works.
John’s top recommendation: The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup. The book is a foundational text for anyone trying to understand why free parking is one of the most powerful subsidies in American transportation policy, and what to do about it. For TDM professionals who can’t price parking but need to understand what they’re up against, it’s essential reading.
Beyond books, John recommends building a habit of mining newsletters from organizations like ACT (Association for Commuter Transportation) and local transit associations. An hour a week scanning these resources, he says, consistently surfaces ideas for improvement projects and incentive programs that would otherwise take months to discover on your own.
Funding, and specifically the potential gutting of public transit. John pointed to the looming threat of significant BART service reductions in the Bay Area, including possible station closures and reduced operating hours, as an example of what’s at stake. When transit infrastructure shrinks, the burden on TDM programs grows and the alternatives (shuttle expansion, ebike programs, carpool incentives) require their own sustained investment. His call to action: TDM professionals need to be making the case for transit funding with both hard data and emotional storytelling.
Rather than a single person, John pointed to a model: the UC campuses where students voted to tax themselves to fund universal transit passes, and the campuses that have built thriving vanpool programs from scratch. He’s drawn to colleagues across the University of California system who bring different toolboxes to similar problems, and who have demonstrated that employees and students will support sustainable commuting options when those options are genuinely good. He’s paying attention to what’s working across the UC network and thinking about how to bring analogous solutions to LBNL’s unique context.
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