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The
Governor, in what amounted to his concession speech
on the subject of the road referenda, promised to
continue to search for solutions and mentioned such
old standbys as mass transit as one of the options
to be pursued. He
also challenged others to offer ideas.
One
wishes that the Governor and/or his transportation
advisors would only read Bacon’s
Rebellion more closely.
Our esteemed publisher and editor in chief,
James Ambrosia Bacon the Manyth, or jabacon@baconsrebellion.com
in e-speak, has effectively demolished the basis on
which much of traditional transportation planning is
based by pointing out that what matters most in the
millions of individual daily decisions that
collectively contribute to our transportation
problems is the flexibility to be at a particular
place at a particular time. (See Car(pool)
Crash, Nov. 4.)
These
decisions are far too idiosyncratic -- the need to
pick up the kids and get them to their after-school
activities, the need to pick up Mary’s dry
cleaning, the need to get some ingredients for the
appetizers for tonight’s church social --
to be ameliorated by any form of centralized
planning. If
the Soviets couldn’t make Gosplan
work in their environment, let us be among the
first to point out that it doesn’t stand a big
chance here in the Land of the Free, Home of the
Brave, and Temple
of
Individualism.
The
answer, friends, would appear to lie in meeting the
need for flexibility with more flexibility.
We
are not, however, talking about flex-time scheduling
or equipping all commuters with the latest in
GPS-guided SUV technology in order to allow them to
strike off cross-country whenever the roads back up.
We are talking about a 20th-century technology that
appears to have achieved adequate reliability and
critical mass in the 21st Century: earning one’s
daily bread remotely via telecommunications
networks, variously referred to as telecommuting or
telework.
For
evidence that such a concept is doable, you need
look no further than the very e-zine which you are
perusing electronically. The contributors, scattered
about the Commonwealth, compose their copy in their
various offices, usually their home office, and then
submit these products over the network to the Manyth,
who then polishes and refines and returns them to
the authors for a final check. The research staff
for this enterprise is in
Africa
and the company that hosts the website on which the
publication resides could be anywhere. The act of
publishing takes place not by starting the presses
but by pressing the button that e-mails the link to
our subscriber list.
There
are a couple of things necessary to make this work.
One is the physical presence of telecom
infrastructure with sufficient bandwidth to make
employment at home office a viable alternative.
As luck would have it, one is most likely to
find higher bandwidth services available in the more
densely populated (i.e., traffic congested) areas.
Another requirement is technical support for
the home-based worker’s desktop.
A third is adequate security and privacy
protection for sensitive/valuable customer/client
data. While
the latter two items are not as readily available as
calling the cable company for more bandwidth, there
are technically feasible solutions for both.
At
this point, we can feel confident in opining that
telecommuting is not a Buck Roger’s idea.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch, in a
recent editorial on transportation issues, offered
telecommuting as one of the possible solutions.
That, in our opinion, is pretty close to
mainstream.
The
RTD, as others have done, argues that government
should lead by example. Private industry,
thankfully, does not always follow government’s
lead on business processes. While government
certainly could develop innovative and effective
solutions to the technical support and
privacy/security issues, the path to industry’s
heart is through the pocketbook, probably in the
form of tax incentives.
This
idea was kicked around during the Gilmore administration
but that doesn’t make it a bad idea in the present
instance. In a state with one-term governors, it is
imperative that one administration build on the work
of others, even if the two cross party lines. There
simply is not enough time in a four-year term to
reinvent the wheel. It is to be expected, and a
small price to pay, that the administration in
office will claim every forward-thinking concept to
have sprung fully developed from the fertile minds
of the incumbents. Besides, these kinds of things
often get better as they mature.
We
are inclined to leave to the current administration
in conjunction with the General Assembly the
specifics of how such incentives might be structured
to achieve the desired ends.
We are not, however, inclined to listen to
anyone who might suggest that using tax policy to
solve transportation problems is inappropriate.
In a free market, capitalist economy, things
that affect the bottom line are persuasive.
Taxes, you may have noticed, impact the
bottom line directly and, often, dramatically.
The
literature on the effectiveness of workers
telecommuting from home offices is, by this time, so
voluminous and so positive that it would be
impossible to review it here. Besides, the Manyth gets
extraordinarily testy when we submit pieces that are
too lengthy. Please
allow us to stipulate that the process works, is
efficient and effective, yields higher levels of
employee productivity and, most germane here, gets
people off the roads during the daily to-and-from
swarmings.
The
governor challenged those who didn’t support the
roads referenda to come up with ideas of their own.
We didn’t take a public position on the
referenda but we do think telecommuting is a much
better approach than anything we have have heard from Capitol Square
of late. Yours
electronically, H&W.
--
November 18, 2002
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