The wider impact of the National Information Infrastructure on the economy and society in contrast to the limited travel impact of telecommuting suggests that a new public policy paradigm is needed. The present dominant paradigm is that telecommunications yields telecommuting, which yields travel savings. A new and better paradigm is that telecommunications yields some travel savings through telecommuting and other travel substitution effects but that it also sets up a countervailing mechanism of travel stimulation that needs to be more widely recognized and better understood. Furthermore, other benefits of teleprocesses are even more important to the nation than travel savings: support of health care reform, efficient government, better education for our children, and rising manufacturing competitiveness. Telecommuting remains a very useful teleprocess, providing an optional work environment where workers can be more productive and closer to their children at the same time.
The U.S. experience of the last few decades does not reveal a natural evolution of the NII substituting for travel. Both grow together, one feeding the other. Travel per household is rising, urban congestion is increasing, and latent demand for travel emerges clearly when new road capacity is opened up, even as the information age expands.
To change to a different developmental path from that followed in the past, governments must learn to coordinate public policy on telecommunications, transportation, land use, and capital facilities investment in light of the interactions described here. The overall challenge is to allocate resources and attention reasonably across the entire spectrum of public facility systems that provide support for the transactions and relationships comprising economic and social life. Such systems include the cables and computers of the National Information Infrastructure; the roads and airports of the transportation system; and physical locations like schools, libraries, clinics, and meeting halls where people interact directly with other people.
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