THE TELECOMMUTERS
Nevertheless, powerful forces are converging to promote the electronic cottage. The most immediately apparent is the economic trade-off between transportation and telecommunication. Most high-technology nations are now experiencing a transportation crisis, with mass transit systems strained to the breaking point, roads and highways clogged, parking spaces rare, pollution a serious problem, strikes and breakdowns almost routine, and costs skyrocketing.
The escalating costs of commuting are borne by the individual workers. But they are, of course, indirectly passed on to the employer in the form of higher wage costs, and to the consumer in higher prices. Jack Nilles and a team sponsored by the National Science Foundation have worked out both the dollar and the energy savings that would flow from any substantial shift of white-collar jobs out of centralized downtown offices. Instead of assuming the jobs would go into the homes of employees, the Nilles group used what might be termed a halfway-house model, assuming only that jobs would be dispersed into neighborhood work centers closer to employee homes.
The implications of their findings are startling. Studying 2,048 insurance company employees in Los Angeles, the Nilles group found that each person, on average, traveled 21.4 miles a day to and from work (as against a national average of 18.8 miles for urban workers in the United States). The higher up the managerial scale, the longer the commute, with top executives averaging 33.2 miles. All told, these workers drove 12.4 million miles each year to get to work, using up nearly a half-century’s worth of hours to do so.
At 1974 prices, this cost twenty-two cents per mile, or a total of $2,730,000—an amount borne indirectly by the company and its customers. Indeed, Nilles found that the company was paying its downtown workers $520 a year more than the going rate in the dispersed locations—in effect, “a subsidy of transportation costs.” It was also providing parking spaces and other costly services made necessary by the centralized location. If we now assume a secretary was earning in the neighborhood of $10,000 a year, the elimination of this commuting cost could have permitted the company to hire nearly 300 additional employees or, alternatively, to add a substantial amount to profits.
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