information and communications technology

One Thing Silicon Valley Can’t Seem to Fix – The New York Times

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The built environment of the Valley does not reflect the innovation that’s driving the region’s stratospheric growth; it looks instead like the 1950s. Looking at aerial views of midcentury campuses like the Eero Saarinen-designed Bell Labs next to contemporary ones like Apple, it’s nearly impossible to tell the midcentury structures from the 21st-century ones. Designing job centers this way contributes mightily to the region’s ever-worsening traffic. If you found yourself stuck on Highway 101 between San Francisco and San Jose, you’d really see what Silicon Valley looks like for many. Building campuses on isolated suburban tracts guarantees long commutes, and this is one of the worst in the country.

Source: One Thing Silicon Valley Can’t Seem to Fix – The New York Times

Kudos to Allison Arieff of The New York Times for raising this issue as I have many times in this space. I’ve also noted the irony that Silicon Valley’s legendary information and communications technology (ICT) innovation has effectively obsoleted the 1950s centralized, commute-in office (CCO), yet the region remains mired in commute traffic.

As Silicon Valley tech pioneer Bill Davidow pointed out in his 2011 book Overconnected, those office complexes came about because the “killer app” of the 1950s was a combination of pavement (freeways), cheap gasoline and the automobile that made it possible to work in another location far from home. Now ICT allows knowledge work to be done anywhere, eliminating the need to move bodies over highways every work day to CCOs. That’s a real killer app for our time to slay commute traffic congestion — in Silicon Valley and other metro areas.

S.F. Bay Area continues to struggle in transition from industrial to information economy amid choking traffic

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“Beat L.A.” is a familiar refrain in Bay Area sports, but it now appears Northern California is on its way to being a rival for Southern California in an unwelcome fashion: traffic jams.Residents in the Bay Area have become discouraged about the heavy traffic in the region, with a dramatically expanding number of them indicating that traffic is worse than a year ago amid a huge surge in the local economy, a new poll released Friday by the Bay Area Council suggests.”Bay Area residents are frustrated about traffic,” said Ruth Bernstein, senior principal with EMC Research, a firm that conducts market and opinion research. “It’s harder for them to get around. We definitely are seeing a backlash against the economic boom.”

Source: Bay Area traffic ignites backlash against boom, new poll suggests – San Jose Mercury News

The crisis of too many cars deepens in the San Francisco Bay Area as does the paradox of one of the world’s leading information tech centers ushering in an information age economy still mired in Industrial Age rush hour commute traffic. Traffic that’s completely unnecessary given the information and communications technology Silicon Valley companies innovated that allows knowledge work to be done where people live. It’s a head scratching situation that makes one think the region is trapped in a time warp with the calendar reading 1966 instead of 2016.

San Francisco Bay Area at decision point as population, sprawl and congestion grow unsustainably

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The Bay Area’s population was boosted by 90,834 people — the size of Santa Barbara — between 2014 and 2015, according to estimates in a U.S. Census Bureau report, dramatically outpacing housing and transportation needs of the region, experts say. […] the relatively steady upswing in the past five years, policymakers say, underscores deficiencies in housing supply and public transportation. “What should be a great story about job growth and very desirable communities is instead a story about housing displacement and gridlock,” said Gabriel Metcalf, president of SPUR. Roadblocks to increasing the region’s housing stock, he pointed out, include zoning laws that prohibit high-density housing, prolonged project approval processes and the fact that many voters are homeowners not directly hurt by soaring home prices and who want to minimize congestion for themselves. The unevenness, especially when new residents are living far from their workplaces, has increased strains on public transit lines. The crowded commuter trains were cast into an ugly spotlight in the past month as mysterious power surges knocked dozens of cars out of operation, and service shut down between the Pittsburg/Bay Point and North Concord stations.

Source: Bay Area’s population grows by more than 90,000 in a year

The San Francisco Bay Area is at a decision point. As this story points out, housing market dynamics in this large geographic region of nine counties increase the distance between where residents work and where they can afford to live, overloading highways and public transit systems. This extracts enormous costs on residents’ daily time budgets, pocketbooks and overall quality of life.

The situation is unsustainable. The Bay Area must now decide whether it will continue to suffer, carrying on as if it were still in the less populated pre-Internet 1970s — when the aging Bay Area Rapid Transit District operated efficiently and within design capacity — or leverage its considerable information and communications technology moxie to replace daily commute trips to distant offices.

The astonishing human potential wasted on commutes – The Washington Post

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According to the Census, there were a little over 139 million workers commuting in 2014. At an average of 26 minutes each way to work, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that works out to something like a total of 1.8 trillion minutes Americans spent commuting in 2014. Or, if you prefer, call it 29.6 billion hours, 1.2 billion days, or a collective 3.4 million years. With that amount of time, we could have built nearly 300 Wikipedias, or built the Great Pyramid of Giza 26 times — all in 2014 alone.Instead, we spent those hours sitting in cars and waiting for the bus. Of course, not all of us have 26-minute commutes. Roughly a quarter of American commutes are less than 15 minutes one way. On the other hand, nearly 17 percent of us have commutes that are 45 minutes or longer. And the prevalence of these long commutes — and of really, really long commutes — is growing.

Source: The astonishing human potential wasted on commutes – The Washington Post

With today’s 21st century information and communications technology, it no longer makes sense for knowledge workers to waste so much time traveling to and from centralized commute-in offices as they did in previous century’s Industrial Age. This article does a great job assigning a personal time cost to the commute.

Organizations have long regarded commuting expense as a cost borne by the employee and not the organization. But there is a significant organizational cost in the adverse impact on employee health and wellness given time spent commuting is time taken away from health promoting behaviors such as exercise, adequate sleep and meals prepared at home rather than take out food. Over time, that can manifest in higher employee health benefit costs, a top cost concern among most employer organizations.

I recently completed a white paper on an alternative workplace wellness concept that utilizes ICT to enable knowledge workers to work in their home communities where they have greater access to these health promoting activities rather than commuting out each workday. I am seeking sponsors for the paper; interested parties can contact me by clicking on the mail button at the top right hand of the site.

Last rush hour may be drawing near as Southern California transit agencies report shrinking ridership

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“I don’t know if this is long-term, but it doesn’t feel like it’s temporary when we’ve been dealing with 36 straight months of declining ridership,” said Darrell Johnson, chief executive of the Orange County Transportation Authority.The decline suggests that Southern California policymakers are falling short of one of their longtime goals: drawing drivers out of their cars and onto public transportation to reduce traffic congestion, greenhouse gases and the region’s reliance on fossil fuels.

Source: Southland transit agencies report shrinking ridership as investments continue to grow – LA Times

The last rush hour may be drawing near in a region infamous for some of the worst rush hour traffic in the United States. Once a region becomes so geographically large and heavily populated as Southern California (and other metro areas including Atlanta, Washington DC and the San Francisco Bay Area), the transportation system becomes saturated and can no longer move people efficiently within reasonable transit times.

Public transit cannot remedy that inefficiency once a tipping point of traffic congestion is reached, often taking longer to reach a destination than driving and reducing incentive to use it. Neither can adding more freeway lanes, which drives up automobile commuting and only buys time until congestion once again snarls traffic a decade or so later.

The good news is information and communications technology (ICT) has matured to the point that office workers no longer need to commute to an office distant from their communities — a pattern enabled by freeways. They can now work in their communities in home offices and co-working spaces. In that regard, ICT can succeed in achieving the long held goal of transportation and regional planners to reduce automobile use for daily commute trips as well as support environmental objectives such as reducing carbon emissions. ICT could already be a factor in reduced public transit ridership as office workers remain in their home communities at least part of the work week.

Moving information — not transporting workers — is the new model for the 21st century

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In fast-growing metropolitan areas like the Bay Area, Boston and Seattle, sub-par infrastructure and pricey housing threaten to put the brakes on rapid economic growth. In struggling areas, infrastructure can be an important obstacle to growth. In either case, as these studies argue convincingly, coordinated regional strategies that include private participation would offer an important competitive advantage.

Source: Infrastructure and the Need for Regional Clout

The meta story here is the Industrial Age, metro-centered model is hitting the wall. As the Bay Area Economic Council report referenced in this article points out, housing market economics work to push people to the far reaches of ever-expanding metro areas. That in turn drives transportation demand and lengthens commutes. In response, regional and transportation planners keep looking for transportation-oriented solutions to bridge the widening time and distance gap. But they cannot work because the underlying template is fundamentally broken, having reached the point of diminishing returns.

The good news in the new century is information and communications technology (ICT) is permanently disrupting this struggling model and its time and life sucking daily commutes to distant, centralized commute-in offices over congested highways and inefficient public transit systems. It’s no longer necessary to move people back and forth daily between home and the CCO. Workers can now easily leverage ICT to work at home or in regional co-working centers located in their home communities. Their work gets done, they can skip the daily commute and pressure on the overburdened transportation system is relieved.

The ultimate killer app: Ending the slog of the daily commute to the office

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The robust development and distribution of information and communications technologies (ICT) has been accompanied by the innovation of applications. Thirty years ago, it was word processing to replace typewriters and dedicated word processors and spreadsheets to replace calculators and paper accounting ledgers. Ever since, tech entrepreneurs have been seeking the next “killer app” with potential for widespread adoption, such as today’s growth of “med-tech” devices to monitor biometrics.

Now with pre-ICT-era traffic congestion still clogging many metro areas and impeding access to jobs, a major killer app is finally scaling up to solve the problem: utilizing the Internet and remote data storage in the cloud to bring information and information workers closer together. ICT disrupts the commute (a long overdue and welcome disruption) by distributing work out of high cost office towers to communities where workers live. As transportation demand exceeds capacity and commutes have gotten longer in many metro areas, ICT has become the ultimate killer app to overcome the time and distance (and related access costs) separating them.

Jerry Brown ponders the high cost of the car as he departs Paris climate confab

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The California governor had spent five days in the city promoting measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lobbying world leaders as they met to negotiate a global climate pact.On Thursday, with those negotiations entering their final stretch, Brown sat with a sweater on his shoulders, Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich’s concept of counter-productivity on his mind.“He said if you count the cost of the hours that you have to work to pay for your car and the insurance and the gasoline, and then add that, kind of translate that into time,” Brown said, “you could go faster on a bicycle.”But looking out the window at the traffic rushing by, Brown said he didn’t “know what to do with all of that, because everybody is working all the time for their car.”“That’s why this is so challenging,” he said. “What we’re doing relative to what needs to be done leaves open a lot of things to be figured out.”

Source: Jerry Brown leaves Paris: ‘We’ll see how we do’ | The Sacramento Bee

One place Brown can begin is asking why there’s so much dependence on automobiles. It’s hard to get people out of their cars when they need them to earn a living. Bill Davidow, author of the book Overconnected, writes on how the rise of the automobile and modern highways following World War II made it possible for people to work in a community far distant from the one in which they live. Now decades later, we are virtually “locked in” to commuting to work by car, Davidow asserts in his book.

But the last two decades have seen the rise of a new information and communications technology infrastructure that obviates the need to drive to a centralized, commute-in office every work day. People can use that infrastructure to bring their work to them rather than the traveling to a distant workplace, working at home or in distributed co-working shared office facilities in their communities. The latter option is also far more accessible by the bicycle commute Brown envisions.

Conversation with Michael Shear on distributed office spaces

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Much of the discussion around the decentralization of knowledge work out of centralized commute-in offices is on telework — which for many connotes working from home. But that’s just one way today’s advanced information and communications technologies (ICT) can be utilized to manage transportation demand and traffic congestion, particularly for those who lack suitable home office space or don’t wish to work at home. Another is distributed office spaces located in communities where knowledge workers live offering social interaction, professional collaboration and IT support without the long commute and the stress and wasted time of rush hour traffic. Instead of thinking of access to centralized commuter offices via transportation infrastructure, a new way of thinking is emerging that flips the focus to providing access to knowledge workers where they live via ICT infrastructure.

Michael Shear heads the nonprofit Broadband Planning Initiative and Strategic Office Networks LLC (Website). He works with communities and organizations through public-private partnerships to establish and manage distributed workplace networks. These benefit knowledge workers by making work more accessible and employers by providing access to a broader labor market and better staff retention. Communities also gain “gas dollars” that would otherwise be spent on commuting and related costs by keeping them in the community. With increasing traffic congestion and reduced proximity to jobs in many metro areas as well as concerns over natural and human caused events in urban centers posing a disruptive threat to organizations, Shear believes a tipping point for broader adoption of distributed community office spaces is at hand. He has written several LinkedIn posts on the topic that can be viewed here.

The Office Space Isn’t Dead, It’s Making A Comeback | Jacob Morgan | LinkedIn

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The office space is far from dead, it’s re-emerging, in fact a recent report from commercial real estate company CBRE found that U.S. Office investment is at a 7-year high hitting $119 billion. So, if the office space isn’t dead then what’s going on? Office spaces are re-emerging as employee experience centers. All of the companies that are investing in new or redesigned spaces are doing so because they realize one crucial change that has happened in the workplace. That organizations can no longer assume that employees need to work there and organizations must in fact create environments where people actually want to show up. These beautiful new spaces aren’t being created for fun or because it’s a nice thing to do. Companies are leveraging their physical environment as a new strategic competitive advantage. Modern cafeterias with catered food, modular work spaces that can be moved around, wood-trimmed walls and floors, colorful art-work, stylish furniture, smart lighting and sensors are all part of creating great employee experiences where people actually want to show up to work.

Source: The Office Space Isn’t Dead, It’s Making A Comeback | Jacob Morgan | LinkedIn

Updating centralized commute-in offices for the 21st century still has a major downside: the fact that people who work there remain separated from them by distance and time, requiring the daily slog and time suck of the 20th century commute. A true 21st century approach is to leverage information and communications technology advances to decentralize knowledge work out to the communities where knowledge workers live.