RALEIGH – North Carolina is missing the boat on how to alleviate traffic congestion.
No, I’m not suggesting that we sort to barges, skiffs, and canoes to get to work every day. For most of the state, that would be possible only during hurricane season. But boating is an appropriate analogy for what I’m talking about: telecommuting.
Years ago, techno-media types settled on the term “information highway” to describe the Internet in all its various and exciting forms. That’s been an unfortunate term in some ways. For one thing, highways are still predominantly government infrastructure, while the Internet can and should be predominantly a private, market institution (yes, I know about the initial Pentagon investment, but the Web didn’t become the Web until after private entrepreneurs got involved).
Another problem is that using a land-transportation analogy for the Internet fails to convey the massive potential gains involved in moving information and ideas via fiber optics. Historically, transportation by land was immensely more costly and complicated than transportation by water. That’s one reason why most great civilizations were built on or near waterways, and why until relatively recently it was cheaper and faster to move people or goods thousands of miles along a circuitous route from point A to point B by ship rather than trying to move them hundreds of miles along a straight-line road. Even today, for suitable commodities, using a barge is a tenth of the cost of using a truck.
The Internet’s ability to move massive amounts of information (text, data, audio, and video) at an extremely low cost is more akin to a barge than a truck. Its implications extend beyond a given firm or economic relationship to the overall productivity of the American economy – and, more to the point here, to the design and health of local communities.
North Carolina governments are going to be spending billions of dollars in the coming years trying to accommodate expected demands on our current transportation grid. Some of these billions will go to more and widened roads, which is a good investment but one with some complexities and diminishing returns. Additional billions will go for railroads, which is a silly investment for a 21st century society.
As Dr. Sam Staley of the Reason Foundation observed Wednesday at the Triangle leg of a statewide tour on innovation in local government, the real action in traffic alleviation is likely to be the use of new technologies to network companies, shoppers, governments, and educational institutions in creative ways that route traffic off the highways. In Charlotte, for example, transit ridership actually declined from 11,186 a day in 1990 to 10,433 a day in 2000. But the number of people working from home on an average day went from 11,390 in 1990 to 20,982 in 2000. The Triangle’s jump was even larger: 21,376 a day in 2000, up from 9,195 in 1990.
There’s something else we can learn by analogy to water transportation. When possible, find ways to travel with a strong current, not against it. For decades now there has been a strong current in favor of low-density urban freedom (some use the pejorative term “sprawl”). This current isn’t artificial. It’s formed by the preferences and decisions of actual people in the real world.
Telecommuting means following this current. Transit means trying to buck it. Bad idea.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.