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[quote user="Sir Madog"] <blockquote> <div><img src="/TRCCS/Themes/trc/images/icon-quote.gif" /> Bucyrus:</div> <div></div> I think the problem of traffic and commuting will be solved by just ending commuting, rather than commuting by train.  We are quickly becoming a service / information economy.  People will just stay home and do their work on the Internet.  This nonsense of driving off to work every day will seem like a relic of the horse and buggy era.  <div style="clear:both;"></div>   </blockquote> I hope this will not happen! Who raises the cattle, who builds the truck that ships it to the meat packing plant on roads or rails built by whom? Who delivers it to your supermarket and builds the car you use to go there? A healthy economy needs all three sectors - agriculture, industry and the service sector to serve those two. Unfortunately, we tend to forget this. We will always need transport, be it private or public. <div style="clear:both;"></div> [/quote] Well, not everybody will telecommute.  Industries like transportation fundamentally require the performers to be moving from one point to another.  Agriculture already requires no commuting, so that is not a candidate for telecommuting.  The same is true for construction jobs.  Manufacturing does require commuting and that cannot be replaced by telecommuting.  However, manufacturing it the one category that is disappearing in the U.S., and will continue to disappear.   <o:p></o:p> Some manufacturing will remain, but most of it is in the suburban rings, making transit difficult to apply.   <o:p></o:p> Where transit is most applicable is from the outer rings into the city core.  Not only are there natural transit-worthy corridors there, but also the road traffic is worse in that commuting pattern than anywhere else.  So there is an incentive to substitute transit for driving.  But the inner city core is precisely where all the information jobs are concentrated.   <o:p></o:p> I know they have been talking about telecommuting for quite some time without much progress down that path.  There is a certain corporate status in the image of all the employees working under one big tent, and companies are reluctant to give that image up.  They have also been talking about building comprehensive rail transit for a long time, but that moves forward very slowly,  <o:p></o:p> In the meantime, the economy is contracting and wages are falling.  This is what will force the transition to telecommuting.  There is no time to wait for transit to be built everywhere.     <o:p></o:p> The cost of living is as high as it has ever been, and wages are falling to 1980s levels in some sectors.  To make that budget work, something has to give, and the main candidate is the cost of commuting.  There is simply no reason for a person who spends eight hours a day sitting at a computer to be driving off to a big beehive downtown every day.  Business is acquiring a very lean and mean attitude in order to compete with the third world, and commuting to a symbolic headquarters every day will soon seem as silly as the hula-hoop.
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