Tuesday, December 25, 2012

It Is High Time For More Telecommuting And Smarter Traffic Management


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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