Public policy could be focused on preparing society for using telecommunications as an alternative to travel during inevitable future periods when transportation capability degrades because of disasters (such as the January, 1994 Los Angeles earthquake), demand surges (such as Atlanta will see in the 1996 Olympic Games), and underfunding of infrastructure maintenance.
As transportation or proximity itself becomes relatively more expensive or even impossible, telecommunications becomes more attractive as a substitute for transportation. Telecommunications works better than travel where costly, time-consuming, arduous, or dangerous trips can be avoided and the function of the trip can still be mostly achieved.
Telecommunications offers opportunities for people to choose new methods of meeting transaction and relationship needs besides making a trip. Traveling 20 miles on Los Angeles freeways in the 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. period to attend a half-hour meeting may be less useful than attempting to achieve the same meeting purpose through teleconferencing. Meeting someone for lunch is best, but a phone call will do if the bridge is blocked. Ordering by phone is better if the store one usually goes to is out of product because the delivery truck is stuck in traffic. Experience in using a telecommunications alternative to travel can lead to repeat use and, eventually, new habits.
General, widespread substitution of telecommunications for travel is not a reasonable government policy objective. There are many good reasons to travel. Other policy objectives such as economic flexibility and competitiveness can often be in conflict with travel reduction. Furthermore, there are also powerful vested economic interests at work to preserve and enhance the value of travel. The automobile, public transit, airline, hotel, restaurant, tourism, retail shopping, professional sports, and real estate industries come to mind.
Government policy can, however, focus on telecommunications as a means for society to gain the flexibility to cope with and work around travel disruptions such as energy supply shocks and natural disasters. An example of the latter was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area, when use of telecommunications for telecommuting and other purposes jumped up and stayed high until the bridges were repaired (Pratt, 1991). Although the track record of telecommunications companies in providing survivable, sufficient capacity following hurricanes, snowstorms, and earthquakes is apparently admirable, there is reason for governments to maintain oversight as the critical dependence of society on telecommunications continues to rise and the level of economic regulation goes down.
Another, related government policy focus can be on providing options to avoid what might be called bad travel--a trip in congested traffic, bad weather, an air pollution emergency, or other circumstances where a citizen simply prefers not to travel. This focus follows easily from a policy emphasis on mitigating disruptions.
Once telecommunications-based alternatives to travel are in place for sudden disruptions and for indisputably bad travel, they are then also available for use as the price of transportation rises for any reason and as the capability of transportation to deliver mobility and closeness gradually degrades because of resource limitations. As people learn to make their telecommunications-based alternatives work, telecommunications becomes a force for letting the economy restructure away from making trips that people do not want or need to make or for which there are attractive alternatives.
Telecommunications can contribute to improving the transportation patterns of the United States if two necessary conditions are met: (1) more understanding about telecommunications-transportation interactions is developed and disseminated to professional and political leadership, and (2) that knowledge is joined with politically acceptable public transportation policy-making aimed at specific transportation outcomes. These two conditions for effectiveness would be met by incorporating telecommunications technology into an integrated resource planning (IRP) methodology that is focused on transportation improvement. Integrated resource planning is discussed below, following some background on transportation planning.
Conformity means that transportation plans and programs within a metropolitan area must provide for the expeditious implementation of transportation control measures specified in state plans. These control measures must be directed toward reducing emissions of air pollutants from transportation sources by improving traffic flow, reducing congestion, or reducing vehicle use. In areas where air quality is not a serious issue, planning usually responds instead to growing roadway congestion and proposals to increase transportation system capacity.
The requirements of ISTEA and CAAA and new flexible federal funding have stimulated states and metropolitan areas to identify new ways to control and manage the demand for transportation and reduce the need for ever more transportation capacity while, at the same time, achieving both the clean air and the mobility that Americans desire.
Telecommuting has begun to be identified in state and metropolitan area plans as one of a broad set of transportation control measures to be encouraged through government policy and private action. Previous telecommuting studies in Washington State and California suggest steps that states can take to expand the adoption of telecommuting in the public and private sectors. Other telecommunications applications are candidates for measures specified in air quality and transportation plans. These applications may include real-time transit information systems, computer ride-matching services, and other IVHS techniques.
Several states and local governments have adopted commute trip reduction laws. Rather than imposing specific transportation demand management (TDM) measures on employers, these laws usually allow employers to plan their own program and select measures appropriate to their situation.
Although not explicitly stated in federal law or rule, the goal of ISTEA to utilize the existing transportation system more efficiently implies that planning should be concerned comprehensively about the costs and benefits of all transportation plans, programs, projects, and measures that reduce congestion and improve air quality
In a March, 1993 national forum in Washington, DC sponsored by the Energy Foundation and the International Institute for Energy Conservation, participants remarked that, although recent federal legislation (ISTEA, CAAA) has pushed for the integration of transportation options, analysis and policy have not responded. Though ISTEA provides new opportunities for planning, funded for the first time with federal money, it leaves much up to states and citizens. The forum concluded that a collaborative approach is needed to develop an integrated resource planning strategy for transportation.
Integrated resource planning is a policy planning and analysis technique to find the right balance between transportation supply and transportation demand management. It would consider a wide range of transportation supply and demand management measures, including telecommunications applications. It also can incorporate data and assumptions about the overall impact of telecommunications on travel demand.
Integrated resource planning refers to a process for developing a public resource acquisition strategy that evaluates a range of supply and demand side options, taking into account such factors as cost, performance, uncertainty, reliability, availability, and environmental externalities. It has been used extensively in electrical power planning, and it has been applied to water resource allocation. A variation is its use to plan strategies for solid waste management that involve complex choices between source reduction, reuse and recycling, and disposal options.
Integrated or least-cost planning has, over the last decade, become the standard methodology for electrical power planning in multi-state regions and in both public and private utility service areas. Public utility commissions have directed electric utilities to base their resource acquisition decisions on least-cost methodology. Municipal electric utilities have, through action of governing boards and local governments, created least-cost planning frameworks to meet new customer demand. In some cases, IRP has been extended to the question of appropriate fuel choice. Tradeoffs between electricity and natural gas as end-use energy sources have been analyzed by using least-cost models.
Transportation planners and policy makers have begun to explore the opportunities offered by IRP and least-cost planning. A number of states have already developed energy strategies that include transportation energy reduction programs or call for comprehensive transportation energy planning. Washington State's energy strategy suggests that least-cost planning methods, developed out of experience in the electrical energy sector, could be applied to transportation. Legislation in California requires a biennial forecast of transportation energy use based on "least environmental and economic cost."
Comparisons of the application of demand-side management in the utility sector to its potential in the transportation sector point up many similarities but also significant differences involving technology and regulatory and institutional issues (Steiner, 1992; Hillsman, 1993). Nevertheless, recent work by Nelson and Shakow (1994) suggests that IRP is the next logical step in the progressive improvement of transportation planning and resource allocation at the federal, state, and local levels. The IRP method could be the planning framework for metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and states as they implement the planning requirements and congestion management system requirements of ISTEA.
An IRP framework, as described by Nelson and Shakow, steps beyond transportation demand management (TDM), which is often approached as a supplement to supply-side investments. In these situations, transportation demand measures are often viewed as producing supplemental benefits beyond the congestion relief gained by expanded roadway or transit capacity. Demand-side measures are not considered as alternatives that may, in fact, deliver more transportation benefit for less cost than additional capacity, such as new lanes of highway or a rail transit system. Integrated resource planning embraces a comprehensive set of measures, each assessed objectively for cost effectiveness and ordered by rank. These measures reach across institutional boundaries for funding and implementation.
New governmental arrangements will be necessary to coordinate elements that may range far beyond those found in traditional transportation plans: from local transit capacity improvements to state assistance for low-income housing near transit stations; from employer-provided transportation allowances to local and state tax subsidies to encourage ride sharing and transit use; from land use policies calculated to capture tax revenues for local governments to regional tax-sharing mechanisms. Congestion itself can be evaluated as a demand management measure, having benefits as well as costs measured in time loss, environmental quality, and so on. Latent travel demand would be balanced against any action to increase system capacity.
Integrated resource planning would allow for the inclusion of two distinct influences of telecommunications capabilities on transportation. First, advanced telecommunications is an increasingly important, far-reaching influence upon the urban transportation dilemma; it shapes the direction and pace of modern economies, including land use patterns and mobility demands. Second, as described earlier, telecommunications is the underlying technology base for a number of new transportation system approaches, many coming under the label Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS). Direct applications of telecommunications and computers are likely to revolutionize transportation in the same way that these technologies have revolutionized manufacturing.
Plans developed with IRP would address freight movement as well as passenger travel and would weigh the economic costs and benefits of solutions that ignore one mode at the expense of the other. Plans would also take into account the impact that restructuring the economy to a just-in-time model has on traffic demand.
There are lessons to be learned from recent developments in manufacturing. Just-in-time manufacturers place a much higher value on transportation predictability than on the transportation and energy efficiency of the delivery mode. Even congestion delays, if they are predictable, can be tolerated. Unpredictable delays can have serious consequences, and manufacturers and their suppliers establish strategies to reduce the uncertainty of delivery and avoid production shut-downs.
An important implication of JIT for government transportation planners is the potential for increased traffic congestion. Depending on plant and supplier location, and on the frequency and timing of delivery, having a larger number of small, partly loaded delivery vehicles may contribute to congestion. A second implication is perhaps more serious. As information management continues to increase in effectiveness and decline in cost, the productivity improvement it has fostered will expand beyond manufacturing into the services sector. This development can be expected to have a similar and even greater impact on transportation demand.
Just as the new manufacturing model may exacerbate the urban transportation problem, it may also provide transportation planners with opportunities to manage transportation systems better. That is possible because companies adopting JIT tend to reduce the number of their transportation vendors in order to develop relationships that produce more reliable yet flexible delivery and shipment schedules. These relationships can lead to practical models for transportation system utilization that are more information based. If transportation planners design a dynamic, comprehensive model of the transportation system, encompassing freight and passenger transport, they may find that manufacturers are willing to contribute important data that will help manage the transportation system. Manufacturers and their vendors may also be more responsive to incentives to use transportation capacity at times and in ways that contribute to its overall efficiency.
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