Traffic

Every day you hear people complain about commute times, lost portions of their lives due to traffic jams, air pollution and a host of other issues related to commuting from one physical location to another. Here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area we have massive road construction projects that make driving worse for years to come and then probably be undersized when they're done.

Are concrete deserts really the solution?

While I no longer commute in traffic every day I did for many years and noticed a couple of things.

1. When schools out and people take vacations, the existing roadways, for the most part, easily handle the traffic needs.
2. When the economy started faltering and people were laid off, the roadways were sufficient to handle the traffic as well.

Stuck in the Industrial Age

We need a great highway system for moving physical goods around the country. We need local roads for distributing those goods within regions and communities. Why, given the technologies we have available today, are we stuck in the industrial age?

• Does every worker really need to be at the same physical location at the same time before work can begin?
• Why do companies insist on building or leasing facilities sufficient to house all their employees simultaneously?
• In larger areas why are we allowing more super-highways instead of demanding public transportation?

Based on the observations above. Traffic jams appear to me, for the most part, to be self induced. Even if we hold that housing everyone at a location is the best method of doing business, do all businesses need all workers at 8am? Why are city planners not working with businesses to more efficiently use the capacity we have today instead of collecting more taxpayer dollars to expand systems that will always run into capacity issues.

I could spend more time on arguing the current system, but we're all familiar with it so lets move on.

Localization

I took a few mintues to look up some statistics, no telling if they're still accurate, but I'm willing to believe that the relative differences are still applicable. It seems to cost about $100 per fiber strand per mile to lay dark fiber. Constructing a highway lane-mile can run from $3 million and up depending on terrain. So we could install 30,000 fiber optic strands per mile for each lane of highway Obviously that's for dark fiber, but even at $10,000 per strand mile 300 fiber strands is a lot of fiber.

For those jobs that really don't require a daily physical presence at a central location, why are telecommunication services not a "no-brainer" solution? Could it be that management schools aren't teaching graduates how to manage effectively? Is it a case of "well that's how business works" so we must do it that way? Are companies afraid that without someone marching up and down the hallway ensuring that people are "in their seats" that no one would do the work they're hired to do? Personally, I think it's a mixture of those issues and more.

Telecommuting or as I like to call it, "Work from Anywhere" (WFA), is very easy to accomplish at very reasonable costs. Even if you couldn't afford or didn't want to allow services in every home. Local commuting centers could be used to house workers on an as needed basis. Additionally they could be set up in suburbs, rural locations, or college campuses, to allow business to pull employees from all over the nation to fill their needs.

Imagine if the commute for each of your employees was 10 minutes or less each way, you'd be giving many people back an hour or two every day that's lost to mindless traveling. Roads would become less crowded and so people that did need to come to a central location would get their faster and also get time back.

It's going to be difficult to break out of the Industrial age mindset, but if our education system adapts and begins training students to manage and work in environments where a physical presence is not a daily requirement then the transistion would be much smoother. I believe the businesses and municipalities that recognize that continual physical presence is a habit and not a requirement are going to be much more successful and may ultimately survive when those that don't die off.