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 this episode, we speak with Arleen Winkelbauer about the practical work of making a different commute feel possible.
Arleen’s perspective is refreshingly grounded: people rarely need to be convinced that a better commute would be nice. They need help getting past the questions that stop them from trying. How do I afford it? What happens if something goes wrong? Is there a route that feels safe? Can this actually work for my life? The strongest workplace mobility programs answer those questions with real support, not judgment.
Watch the full episode now!
Arleen Winkelbuer is a Commute and Transportation Services Associate with CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, supporting workplace mobility and commuting programs at Intuit. Her work spans bikes, shuttles, commuter benefits, employee events, and one-on-one commute consulting.
Before joining CBRE, Arleen spent nearly a decade with Bikes Make Life Better. Beginning as a sales associate and mechanic, she grew into large-scale bike program leadership maintaining campus fleets, launching e-bike pilots, leading group rides, and teaching employees practical skills such as how to fix a flat and commute by bike with confidence. That hands-on experience continues to shape the way she designs support for riders today.
Arleen’s path into the bike world started simply: she was looking for a change from a job she disliked and took a chance on a new Performance Bicycle shop near her home. A slow winter day became a turning point when her manager asked whether she wanted to learn to build a bike. She did! And the work snowballed from there.
Bikes had always been part of her life. Growing up on the Bay Area peninsula, Arleen rode with her family on camping trips and remembers her parents pulling her and her sister in a trailer behind a tandem bike through San Francisco. Like many Americans, she stopped riding once she got her driver’s license. It was working in bike shops that changed her frame of reference: a bike was no longer only a hobby or weekend activity. It could be a real way to get around.
That personal journey matters because it makes Arleen deeply relatable to the employees she serves. She is not asking people to adopt a lifestyle they know nothing about. She is helping them explore a transportation option they may have simply written off years ago.
At CBRE, Arleen helps manage a broader workplace transportation program, with bikes still at its heart alongside shuttles and commuter benefits. Her typical day can include a range of employee questions: What benefits can I use? How do I find a route? What if I need a multimodal commute? How can I travel from one disconnected part of the Bay Area to another?
The answers are rarely a generic brochure. They are often a conversation. Arleen calls much of this work commute consulting; meeting employees where they are, identifying the barriers in front of them, and showing them the benefits and options available. When someone has a person supporting and cheering them on, they are more willing to try something new.
For employer mobility leaders, that is an important distinction. Enrollment data and mode-share metrics matter, but qualitative wins matter too. An employee returning to say, “We talked about this, I tried it, and it worked,” is evidence that a program has moved from awareness to real behavior change.
Arleen is direct about the role of employer-sponsored commute programs: “On the most basic level, they work.” Financial support is especially powerful because it reduces the friction that keeps people in their existing routine. A useful subsidy can make an e-bike, transit pass, parking alternative, or other mobility option more attainable and it can give employees confidence that they will not be left alone if they have questions.
But a workplace transportation program cannot be one-size-fits-all. A subsidy that fully enables one person may only cover part of what another needs. In regions with scattered destinations and incomplete connections, even an excellent benefit may feel intimidating to an employee who has already decided an alternative commute will not work for them.
Arleen’s goal is incremental change. Rather than telling people that driving is wrong, she looks for one practical shift: carpool one day a week, combine transit with a bike, or turn a five-day driving commute into four. That approach is both more human and more sustainable. Small changes create the examples and confidence that enable bigger ones later.
During her time at Bikes Make Life Better, Arleen helped support bike operations on Meta’s campus. The team serviced employee, intern, and campus fleet bikes, and made the program visible by moving bikes with bikes. Using motorized cargo bikes and custom trailers capable of carrying up to 10 bikes, they transported fleets across campus without a truck.
The logistics were functional, but the visual was powerful. Employees could see a bike pulling a trailer full of bikes and immediately understand what was possible. For Arleen, that visibility helped create a culture of curiosity and participation. It is a useful reminder for TDM practitioners: the best programs do not just offer a benefit; they make that benefit tangible in everyday life.
A flat tire, a broken chain, an unfamiliar route, traffic anxiety: these are not small objections to a prospective rider. They can be the reason someone never starts. Arleen saw that firsthand when she taught classes on fixing flats and commuting by bike. Participants often already had the excitement to ride, but they needed the practical knowledge to believe they could handle the unexpected.
Hands-on learning made the difference. In a fix-a-flat class, every participant received a wheel and tire levers to practice the motion themselves. It is more memorable than a demonstration and creates the kind of self-reliance that turns a hesitant employee into a rider.
The same empathy shapes her approach to safety and route planning. Arleen acknowledges that roads and drivers can be unpredictable. Then she offers a useful next step: plan a route that uses existing bike and pedestrian infrastructure, ride it herself first when possible, and, for a work commute, offer to meet an employee at a transit stop and ride in together. Presence matters. “We always like to have somebody in our corner,” she says.
Arleen also speaks candidly about inclusion in cycling. As a woman who was often the only woman in bike shops, she understands why some riders can feel intimidated in a male-dominated space. Women-led rides and welcoming group events are not about excluding anyone; they make room for people who might otherwise opt out before they begin.
That lesson extends to employee bike programs. The goal is not to build for “bikers” who already know every bell and whistle. It is to create one-on-one, approachable experiences that welcome someone who is curious, uncertain, or returning to cycling after years away.
E-bikes are central to Arleen’s optimism about the future of transportation. They remove barriers that traditionally narrow the cycling audience: hills, distance, arriving sweaty, age, and the physical effort of carrying cargo. For someone who has thought, “I like the idea, but I cannot do that,” an e-bike can turn the answer into “maybe I can.”
She is particularly enthusiastic about cargo e-bikes. Beyond their utility, they can create a new family norm. Kids who grow up riding to school or around town may see a bike as an ordinary, joyful way to move through the world. That is the kind of long-term behavior change a commute program can help spark.
Incremental progress. Arleen is motivated by watching micro-mobility orders, Ridepanda subscriptions, and other benefit uses grow month over month. The momentum is proof that the work is making an impact and a reason to keep building on what is working.
Arleen helped transform Intuit’s campus bike program by combining her corporate fleet experience with relationships in the bike industry to add location tracking. Employees can now use an app to find available bikes, while the program gains a clearer picture of how the fleet is being used without focusing on who is riding.
Arleen recommends Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow. The book traces how New York City made streets more welcoming for pedestrians, cyclists, buses, and public life, and offers an encouraging look at how difficult transportation change can become possible.
The lack of a pre-tax micromobility subsidy is a missed opportunity. Arleen sees financial incentives as an important behavior-change lever and wonders how many more people would choose bikes if micromobility received the same kind of support as other commute benefits.
Arleen gives a well-earned hat tip to Google’s GBike team. A long-standing leader in corporate bike programs, the team has stayed resilient through major changes and continues to bring more people onto bikes throughout the Google network. In Arleen’s words, they “walk the walk.”
Arleen Winkelbuer’s work shows that commute transformation is not about finding a single perfect mode. It is about helping people take the next doable step, with the financial support, skills, route knowledge, and encouragement to make that step stick. When employers invest in that experience, they make a better commute genuinely attainable.
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