ICT

We have the “killer app” to slay rush hour traffic congestion

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Los Angeles has topped the INRIX Global Congestion Ranking to be named the most gridlocked city in the world. Carried out by INRIX, Inc., experts in transportation analytics and connected car services, the research looked at traffic congestion in 1,064 cities across 38 countries worldwide, making it the largest study ever of its kind.Los Angeles took the number one spot after the results revealed that in 2016 drivers in the city spent 104 hours in congestion during peak time periods, followed by Moscow (91 hours), New York (89 hours), San Francisco (83 hours) and Bogota (80 hours). Sao Paulo came in sixth, followed by London, Atlanta, Paris and Miami. The US was also named the most congested developed country in the world, with the country accounting for 11 of the top 25 cities worldwide with the worst traffic congestion and with drivers on average spending 42 hours a year in traffic during peak times.

Source: Los Angeles named the most gridlocked city in the world

The Industrial Age has shown we can’t build our way out of gridlock due to what transportation planners term induced demand. Self driving cars and “smart city” traffic controls aren’t the answer either. There’s only so much real estate in crowded metro areas. That’s why they are congested and housing there sells at a premium beyond the reach of most.

We already have the “killer app” to address this problem in the increasingly post industrial, information economy: Internet-based telecommunications technology. It eliminates the need for unnecessary peak hour travel to centralized, commute-in offices since it enables the knowledge and information work traditionally done in offices to be accomplished most anywhere. One no longer needs to sit for hours in rush hour traffic to send email to co-workers and clients, write a report or collaborate on a project.

There are also adverse health as well the obvious environmental impacts of so many vehicles idling on clogged freeways. All that sitting and stress contributes to preventable health conditions as it becomes apparent that like adding more freeway lanes to ease traffic congestion, we cannot medically treat or spend our way to health. Office workers need to get off their butts and out of their cars move around and be active. The most accessible setting for most is in their communities, using the freed up time now unnecessarily wasted on commuting.

Technology will change where we live | TechCrunch

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Finally, we have virtual reality coming in to totally upend things, perhaps rendering the commute obsolete altogether. There’s a reason Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion. Facebook sees the future of social interaction as happening through VR. Microsoft has already shown demos of people in completely different places physically, interacting seamlessly almost hologram-like in a way that’s both creepy and awesome (they appropriately call it Holoportation).Perhaps there are some lingering expectations of people being in the office part-time to build camaraderie (drinking virtual beer together isn’t as fun after all), but the five-day-a-week commute will be undesirable to employees — and to employers who want a recruiting advantage and prefer more workable hours for their employees and can offer it by eliminating their commute.

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Instead of having a few densely populated pockets like we do today, people are going to disperse because technology will make it easier to do so and it’ll be much cheaper to live. Real estate prices will shift — not just in San Francisco, but in every major city. And places that hold universal appeal (e.g. beachfront/close to mountains) will draw more people as a result.

Source: Technology will change where we live | TechCrunch

Dan Laufer reiterates the thesis of my recent eBook Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty First Century. The maturation and continued evolution of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) such as VR conferencing will render the daily Monday through Friday commute obsolete by removing the last perceived barrier to avoiding working daily in a centralized office setting: the need to meet face to face.

As I write in Last Rush Hour, ICT will prove as a profound and disruptive force of change for residential settlement patterns as the automobile was at the height of the Industrial Age by dispersing people out of inner cities to the suburbs.

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.

25 years later, traffic paradox continues to bedevil SF Bay Area

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A quarter of a century ago, I witnessed firsthand the emergence of a robust information and communications technology (ICT) industry in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. Many of these companies were spawned by the then relatively young personal computer revolution that was making ICT portable and far more accessible.

Companies in the bustling region developed software that enabled tasks that were traditionally done on paper in centralized office settings to be performed on these microcomputers at a time when computer automated design and desktop publishing were the hot apps of the day. Other companies made fascinating devices called modems that made it possible to send work done on these innovative small computers to other computers, regardless of where they were located.

I saw the potential of the emerging ICT to alleviate one of the regions worst problems: suffocating, time sucking traffic congestion. I wrote an opinion piece published in March of 1991 in the San Jose Mercury News advocating widespread adoption of telecommuting using the new ICT tools as a solution.

Here it is 2016 and the situation that existed in 1991 is virtually unchanged. The region continues to paradoxically choke on traffic even though its leading companies innovated a way out of it many years ago.

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.

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.

For once and for all, please stop with this ‘death of the office’ stuff – Workplace Insight

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Even hugely disruptive factors such as the proliferation of co-working space appear to be nothing more than an important new addition to the market.

The reasons for this attachment to creating places to bring people together are explored in typically lyrical fashion by the incomparable Neil Usher here. All that remains to add is that so long as people work on the same things and need to develop relationships, they’ll want to share physical space.

Source: For once and for all, please stop with this ‘death of the office’ stuff – Workplace Insight

Of course the office isn’t dead. Knowledge workers will continue to need them. However, the maturation of information and communication technology (ICT) in the 21st century is redefining the office. The office no longer has to be in high cost towers in urban centers — what I term in my book Last Rush Hour as centralized commuter offices or CCOs.

For example, the co-working office space to which the author refers enables knowledge workers to avoid the enormous personal cost of commuting to distant CCOs when these co-working facilities are located in their communities. There, they can serve multiple organizations and their members residing in a given community.

I concur with the author that people naturally want to develop relationships with their colleagues and ideally share physical space. But for knowledge workers, that’s not necessary on an 8-5, Monday through Friday basis. Much work can be done apart from colleagues along with the benefit of quiet concentration. Collaboration can be done via ICT and avoid the major expense and time suck of daily commuting.

Telecommuting USA: Stuck on the threshold of change | The Stack

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Information and communications technologies have swept across the globe and their economic impact affects every community throughout the United States. Not only has this revolution accelerated the growth in the information economy but it has also facilitated the rapid transfer of American jobs to other countries. As America struggles to find its policy footings regarding these swiftly advancing services and technologies, fundamental changes to social and economic structures are well underway. While classical views on the future of metropolitan communities, regional economic development and sustainability planning approaches provide strong emphasis (if not sole) on the transportation and mass transit infrastructure or focus on increasing densities, they exclude any mention of information and communications infrastructure as a tool for planning 21st century communities.

Source: Telecommuting USA: Stuck on the threshold of change | The Stack

As I argue in my book Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century, in this article Michael Shear also portrays the rapid development and proliferation of information and communications technology as a hugely disruptive socio-economic force. It’s obsoleting the twentieth century, Industrial Age pattern where people live in one community and commute to another to work. Now they can work in their communities, either at home or in local shared office space that Shear terms “distributed workplaces.”

 

A Toxic Work World – The New York Times

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Still another woman wrote to me about her aspiration to an executive-level position and the predicament of doing so with a 2-year-old at home: “The dilemma is in no way the result of having a toddler: After all, executive men seem to enjoy increased promotions with every additional offspring. It is the way work continues to be circumscribed as something that happens ‘in an office,’ and/or ‘between 8–6’ that causes such conflict. I haven’t yet been presented with a shred of reasonable justification for insisting my job requires me to be sitting in this fixed, 15 sq foot room, 20 miles from my home.”

Source: A Toxic Work World – The New York Times

So writes Anne-Marie Slaughter of the outdated notion that knowledge work requires a separate, time-defined space in a centralized commuter office (CCO). Her correspondent is right: there really isn’t a logical rationale. It’s Industrial Age custom and practice and no longer necessary and appropriate in the 21st century when the information and communications technology tools knowledge workers need to do their work are widely accessible outside of CCOs. These tools disintermediate the time and distance constraints that place an unneeded and heavy burden on individuals and families.