Alternatives to Travel

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Any action that eliminates unnecessary travel helps build sustainable communities by conserving natural resources, but environmental engineers will likely have a hard time deciding what constitutes unnecessary travel. People travel for the following main reasons: daily commutes, business travel, and vacation travel. Business and recreational travel may
be difficult to curtail because these preplanned trips affect the health of the economy. Daily commuters certainly help the economy too, but their repeated trips along familiar routes offer the best opportunity for adopting new technologies.

The transportation consultant Alan Pisarski hinted at a new way of commuting in a 2004 USA Today article: “Pisarski suggests that building more roads or mass transit options, such as trains or buses, would only encourage more long-distance commutes. The real change, he says, will be when companies build away from the metropolitan centers.” A complete
reinvention of transportation may emerge in the next 50 years. On a small scale, vehicles will still exist, so any new designs to save fuel will grow in importance. On a larger scale, the public and businesses will need to rethink how they travel and why they travel. Any major redesign in transportation for the future will emphasize the use of advanced telecommunication technologies.

Telecommuting is the process of working all or part of the normal workweek from home. Technology already exists that makes wireless telecommuting possible and increasingly common: computers, phones, hand-held communication devices, and fax machines. New technologies in virtual commuting can enhance the telecommuting experience for both employees and employers. In virtual commuting, a worker creates a lookalike image called an avatar viewed on a computer screen to participate in meetings with other employees. The three-dimensional images connect the worker to a main corporate office or other businesses. Virtual commuting may be able to create communities where no corporate headquarters exist; every worker resides at a remote site and communicates with others electronically. Any telecommunications process that connects people working in remote sites is called in-world meeting.

Virtual commuting enables people to sit side by side in an imaginary meeting room, give slide presentations, and communicate by speaker phone or in an online chat room. Companies retain the option to rent remote office space for occasions when employees must meet in person. Rather than commute all the way to headquarters, these employees would take shorter trips to the satellite offices and telecommute together from there to the main office.

Video conferencing offers the same conveniences as virtual commuting, but participants communicate using cameras and talk to each other via a television, projection screen, or computer screen. An A. G. Lambert executive told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, “It’s about being able to have a natural experience even if you’re not sitting in the same room.” Sean M. Grady explained in his book Virtual Reality, “Virtual reality came into being in the mid to late 1980s, following decades of research into ways to remove the hardware wall
between computer users and computer data.” Both video conferencing and virtual commuting have a bright future when, or if, corporations redesign how they do business.

Telecommuting offers an excellent way to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions. Engineers continue
to develop innovations that reduce the sense of
distance between a telecommuter and the central
office. In many instances, as pictured here, a
telecommuter requires uncomplicated technology:
a computer, phone, fax machine, scanner, and a
reliable Internet connection.

Large companies feel comfortable with traditional central offices filled with worker cubicles.
The telecommunications industry must therefore make in-world meeting technologies as attractive as possible to break tradition. Linden Laboratories in California designs virtual communities for businesses so that each business creates a telecommuting system that meets its particular needs. The virtual communities take place on Second Life, a program that allows multiple users to share and edit documents, access public or private company space, and meet in virtual rooms set up to resemble the real-life conference room at headquarters. A computer industry analyst Claire Schooley noted in the Chronicle, “You have so much work that is done on the computer today. They [virtual technologies] make it very easy to connect.” As with so many of the changes needed in transportation, breaking old habits presents the biggest challenge of all.