EFFECT
OF IMPROVEMENTS IN THE NATIONAL
INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE
Will wider deployment of telecommunications or qualitative improvements in the National Information Infrastructure reduce the need for travel? Some public policy analysts have argued that government regulatory changes to accelerate the deployment of switched broadband telecommunications to residential premises, small businesses, and community service facilities such as schools and libraries would boost the use of telecommuting and other travel-substituting applications of the NII.
The argument for explicitly modifying public policy to push deployment of broadband for travel substitution derives from the idea that higher bandwidth and the associated higher cost-effectiveness of applications would accelerate trip substitution; but do currently available telecommunications functions that are usable on existing high-speed communications networks make remote access as good as "being there," thus making travel less necessary? Experiments with these communications technologies and functions to date do not provide any hint of this result; in fact, the opposite is shown. For example, a detailed evaluation of a long-term, complex, continuous video connection between two Xerox Corporation laboratories in different states concluded that the arrangement was not an adequate substitute for face-to-face experience.
Broadband telecommunications enlarges the universe of choices for remote access to information and interaction. Broadband provides higher speed, higher volumes, and higher image resolution in information flows; but as broadband NII lets teleprocesses become more like "being there," the value of using travel will tend to increase. The opportunity to focus human attention exclusively on face-to-face presence, sensate experience, and physical interaction at meetings, places, and events will be a "scarce good" and thus more valuable, as a principle of economic supply and demand. Lunch with the boss, a teacher, or a good customer will usually be worth more than a videoconference with that person.
Could broadband offer new, unforeseen services that in some manner provide people with a compelling reason to travel less frequently? The evidence to date on the compelling things that people do now, such as eating, sleeping, having various kinds of fun, engaging in addictive behaviors, and so on, is that people invariably like to do them in a variety of different locations. Tens of thousands of drunk driving deaths every year illustrate that people like to move around even when they most definitely should not.
The deployment of interactive, more functional, higher bandwidth communications into homes will surely allow more practice of telecommuting, if that is what company managers and their employees continue to find works best. Growing telecommuting is the trend in the United States, but at the same time having a better NII available sooner will not automatically alter the dynamics that make telecommunications a travel stimulator. (As described earlier, these dynamics include new relationships and transactions that cover a wider area, economic growth, suburbanization, transportation improvement, and just-in-time logistics.) Simply accelerating the deployment of high-speed and more functional, interactive telecommunications services into more end-user locations does not transform the economy toward lower transportation intensity. Rather, more powerful telecommunications will feed all of the ways in which telecommunications expands the motivations to travel.
Whether the widespread deployment of a more powerful, higher bandwidth NII will lead advanced economies to show higher telecommunications intensity and lower transportation intensity also depends on changes in the price-performance of transportation. In the United States, for example, the cost of driving automobiles, based on fuel prices, vehicle prices, and taxation, is declining. Travel delays caused by increasing traffic congestion in urban regions can be considered an additional cost of transportation, but these costs are only felt by a portion of the population.
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