“At least in the United States,” notes Richard Harkness, “commuting accounts for 35 percent of all auto and truck fuel consumption.” Much, maybe even most, of the thirty-five percent would be trips to jobs convertible to telecommuting.[[73]]
Ticking off statistics, Harkness illustrates the profligacy of American energy consumption. “The average U.S. worker commutes about twenty miles each day. Eighty-four percent of those commutes are by automobile, 65 percent with only the driver. Two hundred and twenty million Americans consume 18 million barrels of oil per day, roughly 30 percent of the world’s supply.” He also notes the cost of America maintaining forty thousand miles of superhighways and 4 million miles of streets and roads. “It has been estimated,” says Harkness, “that 248,500 U.S. bridges need major repairs at a cost of $47 billion.”
And beyond the energy and financial prices, what about the psychological ones? Even part-time telecommuters can greatly reduce the stress on their nerves and schedules, perhaps lowering medical costs for society. “An employee who drives an hour to work would save sixteen hours in commuting time each month, or the equivalent of two eight-hour workdays, by working at home two days a week,” says Frank W. Schiff, a Washington economist.[[74]]
Even battle-scarred urbanites with short commutes might relish the chance to work at home two days out of five. Skyscrapers and their occupants keep hogging downtowns, aggravating congestion and tension; and a taxi trip of just a dozen blocks in New York City can take a half an hour at lunchtime.
In Houston, meanwhile, some gun-toting commuters are literally murdering each other, saying in effect: “Your right of way or your life!” Jon Verboon, a Houston Chronicle reporter who has worked the police beat, told me, “It’s not uncommon for shots to be exchanged between motorists who are hacked off at each other”—sometimes over right of ways. An accident needn’t have occurred.
Motorists killed more conventionally on the way to work, of course, are a hefty percentage of the fifty thousand yearly highway fatalities. But how could a telecommuter die? Electrocution? Cutting his wrists on a broken video tube? Forgetting about the rather unlikely radiation risks—which flat screens would reduce if these dangers existed—computers needn’t be lethal like cars.
By converting to telecommuting, then, companies in the end might save employees’ lives as well as energy and money.
Firms making the transition would do well to consider what will be in the data base into which the telecommuters would tap. The range of requirements is as wide as the range of business activities. A good data base for telecommuters, however, isn’t that different from the ones that some managers are already using by way of terminals on site. Here are the traits:
1. Ease and speed of use. You needn’t be a computer expert or wrestle with inconveniences like dialing fifteen-digit numbers to reach the main computer. The system explains itself on screen if you want it to, though experienced users can switch off the menus when they’re ready. You ideally don’t have to wade through an instruction manual. The system tells you when you’re tapping out wrong commands. Also, it’s fast. You can start using it in a hurry, and you don’t have to wait more than a few seconds at the most for it to respond to your commands. And you constantly feel in control. You can easily search through the data base for the information you want.
2. Friendliness. A good system isn’t just easy to use; it’s also boy scout polite, sprinkling its prompts with “Thanks yous” and avoiding intimidating terms like “illegal information request.” Commit a careless mistake on some data bases and they’ll throw back lawyerish words suggesting you’re on the verge of a jury indictment.