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Guru
of Gridlock
Tim
Lomax, co-author
of the 2005 Urban Mobility Study, says there’s
no simple remedy for traffic congestion --
Americans need to try a wide range of strategies.
His thinking could pave the way for a distributed
workforce strategy.
Traffic congestion is getting
worse year after year, with no let-up in sight. In
the good ol’ days of 1982, back when Americans
had no idea how good they had it, motorists in the
United States’ biggest cities experienced an
average of 16 hours per year of congestion-related
delay. By 2003, according to the 2005 Urban
Mobility Study, the congestion toll had
quadrupled--to about 67 hours per year. The cost
in lost time and wasted gasoline ran about $63
billion nationally.
After publication
of the report, the most authoritative study of
traffic congestion in the country, the cry
predictably rang out in Washington, D.C., and
state capitals that more money was needed to
expand the capacity of state highway and mass
transit systems. Pressure mounted on lawmakers
around the country to “do something,” even if
it meant floating bonds or raising taxes.
More money is needed, contends Tim Lomax, a
research engineer at the Texas Transportation
Institute (TTI) and co-author of the report, but
it will take more than building roads and laying
track to fix what ails transportation in the
United States. “The problem has grown too
rapidly and is too complex for only one technology
or service to be ‘the solution,’” he writes
with co-author David Schrank.
Lomax
recommends balancing macro construction projects
with micro refinements that squeeze more capacity
out of existing roads. He also calls for “demand
management” technologies, such as
teleconferencing and telework, which would
eliminate the need for many automobile trips
altogether.
“The 2005 Urban Mobility
study calls for a multi-faceted approach to coping
with traffic congestion. Most insightful is the
call for managing demand – essentially, changing
peoples’ driving patterns,” comments John
Vivadelli, president of AgilQuest Corporation.
“By harnessing technology and changing business
practices, we can free people from the daily slog
on the same overloaded highways, at the same time
of day, to the same big office centers.”
Telecommuting was a bust in the 1990s, Vivadelli
observes, but the idea has been revived under the
rubric of the distributed workforce. Cell phones
and laptops make it easier for people to work
anywhere and avoid driving during periods of peak
traffic congestion by working at home, meeting a
client at Starbucks or plugging into a
neighborhood satellite office--taking advantage of
what he calls the “Network of Space.”
Pilot projects undertaken by the federal
government have demonstrated that employers can
boost productivity, reduce office utilization and
take cars off roads. State governments have as
much to gain from such a strategy as the feds,
Vivadelli suggests, because states are the guys in
the trenches fighting congestion. “Anything that
takes cars off roads takes the pressure of the
states to increase taxes.”
AgilQuest
caught up with Lomax the other day in his office
in Austin, Texas, and chatted by phone about the
alternative transportation strategies enumerated
in the 2005 Urban Mobility Study. Lomax confirmed
our conviction that a key part of any
transportation solution is finding ways to change
peoples’ driving patterns.
A
comprehensive transportation strategy, Lomax
contends, would blend four broad approaches:
Add capacity. Build more roads, more interchanges,
more multi-model connections, and add more public
transit capacity. Adding capacity is unavoidable,
but it’s more difficult and more expensive than
it used to be, Lomax notes. Most metro areas bump
into fiscal constraints – transportation
spending would need to double in most major cities
to make progress. Meanwhile, environmental rules,
like those in clean air non-attainment areas, can
be restrictive, and citizens typically protest any
effort to run a new road anywhere near their
neighborhoods.
Improve efficiency.
Apply information technology to increase the
productivity of existing transportation assets.
Synchronize traffic lights, for instance, to
respond to changing traffic conditions. Or install
meters at entrance ramps to smooth the flow onto
highways and reduce the congestion caused by
merging traffic. These improvements offer a good
Return on Investment, Lomax says, but their
potential impact is somewhat limited.
Change development
patterns. Encourage more
compact, better connected, development projects
that encourage people to walk or ride bicycles for
short trips instead of driving cars everywhere.
Encourage more mixed-use projects that place
houses, offices and amenities closer together so
that people take shorter trips when they do decide
to drive. The impact can be significant, but
changing local zoning codes and comprehensive
plans can be political dynamite.
Manage demand. Encourage ride sharing, or provide
motorists with real-time traffic information that
allows them to avoid congestion by changing the
time or route of their trips, deploy technology to
eliminate the need for trips through
teleconferencing
and telework. Telecommuting takes
people off the roads, Lomax explains. But it’s
not a panacea because not everybody’s job lends
itself to working at home, no matter how good the
technology they’re using to connect to the
office.
Supervisors still like to see bodies
behind desks. But some people could telecommute,
even if only a few days a month or a few hours a
day. “Programs like that are more acceptable to
the supervisor than someone who says, ‘Hey,
I’m telecommuting, you won’t see me this
week!’" The bottom line, says
Lomax: Telecommuting must boost business
productivity, not hurt it, if it’s going to be
an economically viable solution to traffic
congestion.
The economy has come a
long way since the 1990s when many communities
experimented with telecommuting and found it
lacking. While society benefited from taking
commuters off the road, enterprises were saddled
with the cost of investing in telecommuting
infrastructure and the difficulty of supervising
employees who worked at home.
Two
major trends have changed the telecommuting
trade-offs over the past decade. First, a wave of
new technologies – cell phones, broadband
connections, wireless laptops and collaborative
software – has brought down the price of working
away from the office. Second, the nature of the
workforce is changing.
While the rise of the
“distributed workforce” is old news to the
bevy of hardware and software vendors who equip
it, the ramifications of the tectonic shift in the
relationship between workers and the workplace has sunk into transportation
planners, many of whom still use the outdated
vocabulary of the ‘90s.
“Telework implies that
you’re setting up people to work at home,”
explains Vivadelli. The idea behind the
distributed workforce is to enable people to
work where it’s most productive to work. Put
another way, the idea is to take the work to the
worker, not the worker to the work.”
From the
perspective of the transportation planner, the
shift to the distributed workforce is mostly a
good thing. To the extent that it takes
people off rush-hour freeways, it eases the
periods of peak congestion. To the extent that
mobile workers drive more during business hours,
however, it may put more cars on roads during
non-peak hours. But it’s the
periods of peak demand that planners are most
concerned about.
“I agree with
Tim Lomax: There are no silver bullets to solve
traffic congestion. We have to pursue a wide array
of strategies,” says Vivadelli. “But there’s
a good reason to move a distributed workforce
strategy to the top of the list: It doesn’t cost
the state money like highways and transit lines
do. It saves money. You can’t beat that!”
--
July 25, 2005
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