Virginia’s transportation crisis is largely a commuting crisis: traffic congestion encountered along the routes, and during the time of day, that people drive between home and work. This crisis is as much an artifact of late 20th-century social arrangements as it is a shortage of road capacity and dysfunctional land use patterns. As long as Virginia has a service-based economy in which most economic activity takes place in centralized places called “offices” at uniform times of day — usually 8:00 to 5:00 — congestion is inevitable.
Commuting habits arguably have gotten more uniform in recent decades, not less. Back when Virginia had a strong manufacturing sector, factories worked according to different shift schedules than the service sector. I remember living in Martinsville some 25 years ago when the American Furniture Company whistle would blow every 3 p.m. Growing up in Norfolk, I also remember how the streets would fill at 3 p.m. during shift change at the Navy Base. Those off-hour shifts may persist in places, but they are less prevalent than they once were. A large majority of Americans have settled into service-sector hours, crowding the same roads at the same time of day.
That’s why I harp upon the incipient revolution between worker and workplace made possible by cell phones, wireless laptops, virtual private networks and related technology. We’re seeing the early signs of reversal of the lemming-like rush hour migration. Organizations are becoming more flexible about where their employees work and when. I’ve written about this trend in a couple of places, including WORK magazine here in Richmond, as well as an electronic newsletter I produce for AgilQuest Corporation.
AgilQuest produces software and systems that measure office utilization and handles the scheduling for office sharing. Office surveys consistently show that the typical office desk is less than 50 percent utilized at any given time. Increasingly, people are spending their time in collaborative sessions in meeting rooms — or they’re not in the main office at all.
With AgilQuest’s permission, I am republishing three Q&A features I produced for the company’s newsletter, “Network of Space.” The first Q&A featured Mark Dixon, CEO of Regus Corporation, a company that offers hyper-flexible office space, including single cubicles and “hot desks” for people requiring one-man offices for very short periods of time.
This week’s Q&A features Jim Young, CEO of the RealComm conference company and an apostle of change in the real estate sector. Young, who takes people on intelligence-gathering trips to Europe and the Far East, says that the U.S. commercial real estate industry is a global laggard in adopting new technology. He believes that rising energy prices will accelerate the shift to tele-work and hoteling.
The implications of this tectonic societal shift both ominous and hopeful. Much of the office space being constructed today may soon become obsolescent. That’s bad news both for the property owners and the local governments that depend upon revenues generated by those properties for their tax base. But it may be good news for commuters. Not only is technology liberating many knowledge workers from the centralized workplace, but organizations are increasingly flexible about when they need to be in the office. Furthermore, visionary developers are providing entirely new categories of office product that cater to the mobile workforce.
The predictable consequence of these changes is that many people will alter their commuting patterns to avoid peak-period congestion. They have more flexibility than ever before to work at home, at the neighborhood Starbucks, at a client’s office, or in a new-generation tele-work center. Should Virginia ever adopt a regime of congestion pricing, Virginians would have greater flexibility than at any time in their history to alter their commuting behavior.
But public policy in Virginia has largely overlooked these changes. The state has made a nod to telework with some minor pilot programs. But the big money, as demonstrated by the latest GOP legislative compromise, continues to be funneled into massive road- and transit-building projects funded by taxes instead of tolls. There is minimal interest in congestion pricing. Politicians prattle about building a transportation sector for the 21st century but they employ the top-down, tax-and-spend methods of 20th-century socialism.
