Telecommuting eases traffic

Although Carolyn Inglis' job as a logistics expert for FedEx requires communicating with clients all around the world, she commutes to work by walking down one flight of stairs in her Nevada City home.

"Telecommuting is a different mindset," Inglis said. "I can touch any part of the globe from my home office in my pajamas, and there's something to be said for that."

The company's headquarters is in Nashville, Tenn. But from her home office here, Inglis can conduct a teleconference with colleagues in Asia while gazing out at Scotts Flat Lake. On the day after Christmas, she said that she slept late and was still able to put in a day's work while sitting just a few steps away from the leftover eggnog in the fridge.

Inglis is one of a growing number of telecommuters working in Nevada County, where the percentage of people working from home at least part-time is higher per capita (7.6 percent) than in San Francisco and Sacramento, two cities that rank in the top 10 telecommuting metropolitan areas in the country. The figures are based on 2000 federal Census data compiled into a 2005 report by the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation.

As the county's population grows, local officials see telecommuting as a viable solution to increasing traffic congestion and pollution.

According to the same Reason Foundation study, telecommuters outnumber mass transit commuters in 27 of the nation's 50 largest cities. More people are switching to telecommuting than are switching to public transit.

"Telecommuters don't cost the public anything, yet they're more effective at reducing traffic than public transit," said Russell Steele, a commissioner with the Nevada County Transportation Commission. He also sits on the board of directors of the Nevada County Economic Resource Council.

Since 2000, Steele has spearheaded the Telecommunications Infrastructure Committee at NCERC with the goal of identifying gaps in the county's broadband coverage and increasing high-speed Internet access for residents and entrepreneurs.

Steele said that, while county maps of Internet coverage roughly estimate that 75 to 85 percent of Nevada County residents have potential broadband access, there are pockets within these supposedly covered areas where residents "can see the end of the Comcast cable from their deck but can't get the cable to their property."

One solution to increased coverage is for the county to spur competition among Internet and wireless providers.

In one instance, Steele said, Penn Valley residents complaining in 2002 of slow dial-up service were told by AT&T that the company had no immediate plans to install high-speed cables in their area. However, once a local wireless company started raising a tower in Lake Wildwood, "all of the sudden, bam, there were DSL remote terminals in Penn Valley," Steele said.

"If we put creative forces to work, things will change," said Steele.

The second hurdle to increased telecommunication, Steele said, is changing the attitudes of managers who equate productivity with seeing employees' faces in the office every day.

If Inglis' work group at FedEx is any indication, managers need not worry about slackers when considering a paradigm shift in the workplace. Since Inglis' job required a lot of travel, FedEx found that there was no reason to keep an expensive suite of offices when she and others on her team could just as easily work from home when they weren't on the road.

"I think you work up to this position," Inglis said. "I'm at the upper end of FedEx folks who do this. Some days I work six hours, other days 10 hours."

Increasing traffic

While beeping horns and snarled traffic have become the norm for commuters in cities such as Los Angeles, Nevada County's proposed housing developments could potentially turn local commuters' rush minutes into rush hours.

With Highway 49 approaching its usable capacity of more than 20,000 trips a day, local roads will only get more congested as more people move into the county, said Dan Landon, executive director of the Nevada County Transportation Commission,

"People (in Nevada County) are as unhappy waiting through two signal changes as people in the Bay Area are waiting 20 minutes in a congested area," Landon said. "Unless we can make improvements to the roads, they'll become more and more congested."

Landon's comments suggest that, while the area's tall pines and rolling hills have attracted many home buyers to its quiet, rural setting, it won't be immune to city-style road rage if county officials don't plan ahead.



High-speed access

Besides saving gasoline, telecommuters save hours. The time that telecommuters don't spend in their cars idly switching radio stations and stressing about traffic equals 470,000 jobs nationwide, according to the 2005/2006 National Technology Readiness Survey by the Robert H. Smith School of Busineess at the University of Maryland.

The survey also reported that more than half of the respondents who said they had the option to telecommute preferred to drive to work every day.

Grass Valley is working to reduce the number of commuters by encouraging people planning new housing developments to include fiber optic T3 lines in their blueprints. The first targets are the four special development areas outside city limits.

"The (City) Council has set up a measuring stick that, if the project is going to be built, it needs to have telecommunication opportunities," said Joe Heckel, Grass Valley's Community Development Director. According to Heckel, developers whose projects includes high-speed Internet access "will be more favorably reviewed" by council members.

If the incentives by Grass Valley officials and Nevada County officials are successful in linking county residents to the information highway, fewer residents will have to travel the physical highways.

For county residents, this is good news. Although the transition from central office to home office has the disadvantage of less social interaction, telecommuters like Inglis found other benefits besides working in her pajamas.

"Everything's a tradeoff," said Inglis. "I've never been fond of the kind of office setting, personally. I like the flexibility."

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To contact Staff Writer Jill Bauerle, e-mail jillb@theunion.com or call 477-4219.