The Current Situation
This will obviously be an
incomplete description of the current situation.
How many hours are lost each
day due to traffic congestion during rush hours? How much gas is wasted? And so
on, because so many employees still follow this convention of driving to and
from work every week day at about the same time. More flexible work hours so
far appear to have had only a minor positive impact.
For various reasons roadways
are not being built to alleviate some of this daily traffic ordeal during rush
hour. Environmentalists and urban planners are against it and they tirelessly
try to make commuting more of a hassle, e.g. HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes.
Telecommuting Is Ready For Prime Time
Like the paperless office in
recent times, telecommuting was overhyped and overpromised when it started in
the early 1970s. But what a difference 40 years makes! Before the industrial
revolution it was very common to work at home for most workers.
Given today’s technology in
the 21st century it would be very feasible to implement
telecommuting on a large scale to achieve something like that the average employee
drives to work only a few days a week, the rest of the time he or she works
from home or some other location that requires less driving. Nowadays, many office
jobs could be done from home even those where sensitive information is
involved. Most IT/software development work could be done from home as well.
Today, according to the Wall
Street Journal just 6.6% of the US workforce work from home fulltime in 2010 up
from 4.8% in 1997. That is a positive development in the right direction, but less
than three percentage points in over a decade is very slow.
However, I do not advocate
government intervention or subsidies to promote more telecommuting. Government
could play a role in educating about the benefits of telecommuting. It could
also reduce business taxation so businesses could opt to implement more
telecommuting, if beneficial to their business.
More telecommuting offers
businesses the opportunity to reduce all kinds of costs, e.g. buildings or
other infrastructure.
US Health Insurance Companies Do It
A recent Wall Street Journal
article titled “Out of the office but
still on the job” (subscription required) by David Wessel published on
12/20/12 highlighted that at least two major health insurance companies in the
US, i.e. Aetna and Cigna Corp., where a substantial number of employees work
full time from home.
According to the article, “nearly
half – 47% - of Aetna’s 35,000 US employees work from home. It allowed Aetna to
“drive down costs, particularly real-estate costs … estimates … are 15% to 25%
lower than they would otherwise be. … reduced Aetna’s total office space by 2.7
million square feet …”. “About 20% of employees at Cigna Corp … work from home.
Smarter Traffic Management
Something that I personally
find offending when I commute to or from work or in general is that urban
surface street traffic lights are too often timed in such a way that you are
stopped at one light to be stopped again at the light just one or two blocks
away on non-residential streets. Is this intentional or just coincidence?
Given the ideological mindset of urban planners preoccupied with routing
traffic or discouraging certain traffic I assume the former.
A recent article by the UC
Berkeley NewsCenter titled “Cellphone,
GPS Data Suggest New Strategy for Alleviating Traffic Tie-Ups” published on 12/20/12 gives you a
flavor of what might be possible in the near future to smartly route commuter
traffic based on our smart cell phones with built-in GPS, accelerometers etc..
This study got it a little wrong when it blames basically the commuter for the
congestion by saying something like “not all drivers are contributing uniformly
to congestion”. The focus of this study was probably also too narrow, but it nevertheless
offers insights how our cell phone data could be used to minimize traffic
congestion by offering advice to redirect traffic or by adjusting the timing of
traffic lights etc.
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