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S.F. Bay Area continues to struggle in transition from industrial to information economy amid choking traffic

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“Beat L.A.” is a familiar refrain in Bay Area sports, but it now appears Northern California is on its way to being a rival for Southern California in an unwelcome fashion: traffic jams.Residents in the Bay Area have become discouraged about the heavy traffic in the region, with a dramatically expanding number of them indicating that traffic is worse than a year ago amid a huge surge in the local economy, a new poll released Friday by the Bay Area Council suggests.”Bay Area residents are frustrated about traffic,” said Ruth Bernstein, senior principal with EMC Research, a firm that conducts market and opinion research. “It’s harder for them to get around. We definitely are seeing a backlash against the economic boom.”

Source: Bay Area traffic ignites backlash against boom, new poll suggests – San Jose Mercury News

The crisis of too many cars deepens in the San Francisco Bay Area as does the paradox of one of the world’s leading information tech centers ushering in an information age economy still mired in Industrial Age rush hour commute traffic. Traffic that’s completely unnecessary given the information and communications technology Silicon Valley companies innovated that allows knowledge work to be done where people live. It’s a head scratching situation that makes one think the region is trapped in a time warp with the calendar reading 1966 instead of 2016.

If Work Is Digital, Why Do We Still Go to the Office?

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The transformation of our work environments is only just beginning, but it could have a major impact on architects, developers, corporations, and society at large in the years to come. Far from making offices obsolete, as the digital pioneers of the 1990s confidently predicted, technology will transform and revitalize workspaces. We could soon work in a more sociable and productive way, and not from the top of a mountain. The ominous “death of distance” may be reversed with the “birth of a new proximity.”

Source: If Work Is Digital, Why Do We Still Go to the Office?

This analysis ignores what I would term the “tyranny of distance” that comes into play with daily commute trips to centralized office buildings. And that tyranny extracts an enormous and now unnecessary cost from knowledge workers in lost personal time, stress and daily travel expense.

The 1990s visionaries (and for that matter, those that preceded them in the 1960s (Arthur C. Clarke: “Men will no longer commute, they will communicate”) and the 1970s (Alvin Toffler and the “electronic cottage”) were right: information and communications technology disintermediates distance. It has now matured to the point that the daily commute is obsolete and collaboration can be done virtually with the occasional in-person meeting to reinforce social ties.

Trouble unplugging from work? Join the crowd

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Particularly in an economy that’s still struggling to find its footing, at a time when employees still feel insecure about the future, companies will have to do a better job of recognizing the threat of overwork and detecting and addressing potential problems early on, Cross said.”While enabling a work culture that embraces flexibilities, leaders also have to be cognizant of the expectation they set for their workers to be ‘on’ or available all the time,” she said. “Not only will this require a culture shift, but also a new set of competencies for both employees and managers, to learn how to effectively manage personal time, set boundaries and identify the signs of being overworked.

Source: Trouble unplugging from work? Join the crowd

Welcome to the “digital workplace” as author Paul Miller has termed it in his 2012 book The Digital Workplace: How Technology is Liberating Work. Lacking the constraints of place and time that defined the Industrial Age workplace — the 9-5 office — as a society we are having to adjust. In knowledge work, some of the best thinking and creativity doesn’t necessarily happen when we are nominally “working” since the mind never truly shuts down until we’re dead.

The bigger issue here is redefining knowledge work now that it no longer necessarily means traveling to a commute-in office to cogitate and communicate since these activities can be done most anytime, anywhere. As Mika Cross suggests, we will have to learn to manage them in order to avoid creating a “hive mind” that makes incessant demands 7/24. These minds are human beings and need downtime to refresh in order to remain sharp and focused.

Report: Housing costs, traffic congestion motivate workers to seek balance beyond Silicon Valley

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In another sign that Silicon Valley isn’t as gilded as it once was, more tech workers want to leave, according to the Woo data. Almost 30 percent of Bay Area workers surveyed in the first quarter indicated they wanted to relocate, compared with 22 percent in the quarter before. New York was highest in demand.There are a number of growing tech hot spots outside Silicon Valley, May said, most of which have a lower cost of living. And that ties into the fact that people surveyed are putting a greater emphasis on work-life balance. “People are changing their priorities,” he said.There’s evidence the exodus away from Silicon Valley has started already. In 2014 more people left Silicon Valley than moved in, for the first time since 2011, according to a study by the Silicon Valley Competitiveness and Innovation Project. More than 7,500 residents hit the road, the study found. The researchers blamed quality of life issues such as skyrocketing housing prices and increasing traffic congestion.

Source: Tech workers lower salary expectations amid economic uncertainty – San Jose Mercury News

It’s time for Silicon Valley to progress to the Information Age — using the information and communications technology it innovated — and out of the Industrial Age model of centralized commuter offices and mega corporate campuses. This technology now allows information workers to do the same work they do in Silicon Valley in the cloud. That way, they can skip the daily commute and live where housing is more affordable.

San Francisco Bay Area at decision point as population, sprawl and congestion grow unsustainably

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The Bay Area’s population was boosted by 90,834 people — the size of Santa Barbara — between 2014 and 2015, according to estimates in a U.S. Census Bureau report, dramatically outpacing housing and transportation needs of the region, experts say. […] the relatively steady upswing in the past five years, policymakers say, underscores deficiencies in housing supply and public transportation. “What should be a great story about job growth and very desirable communities is instead a story about housing displacement and gridlock,” said Gabriel Metcalf, president of SPUR. Roadblocks to increasing the region’s housing stock, he pointed out, include zoning laws that prohibit high-density housing, prolonged project approval processes and the fact that many voters are homeowners not directly hurt by soaring home prices and who want to minimize congestion for themselves. The unevenness, especially when new residents are living far from their workplaces, has increased strains on public transit lines. The crowded commuter trains were cast into an ugly spotlight in the past month as mysterious power surges knocked dozens of cars out of operation, and service shut down between the Pittsburg/Bay Point and North Concord stations.

Source: Bay Area’s population grows by more than 90,000 in a year

The San Francisco Bay Area is at a decision point. As this story points out, housing market dynamics in this large geographic region of nine counties increase the distance between where residents work and where they can afford to live, overloading highways and public transit systems. This extracts enormous costs on residents’ daily time budgets, pocketbooks and overall quality of life.

The situation is unsustainable. The Bay Area must now decide whether it will continue to suffer, carrying on as if it were still in the less populated pre-Internet 1970s — when the aging Bay Area Rapid Transit District operated efficiently and within design capacity — or leverage its considerable information and communications technology moxie to replace daily commute trips to distant offices.

The ongoing paradox of the SF Bay Area

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The transit agency suffered Thursday from the same woes that impacted service the day before with no trains running between the Pittsburg/Bay Point and North Concord stations in the East Bay. A bus bridge ferried passengers between the two stations and the entire system operated with more than 50 cars fewer than usual.

Source: Down at least 50 cars, BART chaos expected to spill into Friday – SFGate

This story points up the continuing paradox of the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the nation’s most information and communications technologically advanced metro areas of the United States. It has all the tools to operate in a distributed, 21st century business environment. But it remains stuck in the 1970s (when BART went into service), with its residents needlessly schlepping back and forth each weekday to centralized, commute-in office buildings and enduring much wasted time and frustration.

California Commuters Continue to Choose Single Occupant Vehicles | Center for Jobs and the Economy

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Attendant with the increased reliance on single occupant vehicles, workers are also spending more time commuting. The number of workers commuting longer than 30 minutes grew from 3.2 million (30.5% of commuters) in 1980 to 6.5 million (40.6%) in 2013 and to 6.8 million (41.4%) in 2014. This trend stems in large part from the growing congestion on California roads, but also reflects the continuing influence of housing costs on the commuting choices California workers are able to make. As the state’s regulatory systems continue to drive up housing costs especially within the coastal urban areas, workers also continue to rely heavily on single occupant vehicles to expand their housing affordability options, even in face of the additional time and travel costs associated with these longer commutes.

Source: California Commuters Continue to Choose Single Occupant Vehicles | Center for Jobs and the Economy

The report goes on to note one of the best (and I would add lowest cost) alternatives to mitigate commute transportation demand is reducing the need to commute in the first place:

Working at home continues to be the fastest growing alternative commuting mode, although at less than a million workers out of a total of 17 million statewide, its potential as a broader solution remains unfulfilled.  However, the ability of employers to expand this option and provide the flexibility many workers desire remains challenged by the ever-growing body of California-only employment regulations and their associated litigation risks.  Further expansion of this commuting mode will likely remain tied more to the self-employed and higher-income professionals rather than applying to a broader range of workers and income levels.

The obvious conclusion: In order to reduce commuting, knowledge work and management practices must be redefined for the 21st century where information and communications technology (ICT) makes it possible for all levels of workers to work remotely from home or in satellite and co-working spaces in their home communities. And not just self-employed and higher income professionals given the high cost of housing in central metro areas that pushes lower income earners out to the edges.

There’s another bonus that is certain to pique the interest of employers concerned about ever rising spending on health benefit costs. Having staff work in their communities frees up time to engage in healthier lifestyles and provides greater access to health promoting behaviors. I recently completed a comprehensive white paper on this topic. For more information, contact me by clicking the email icon at the upper right of the page.

5 reasons why ‘no office’ is better than ‘some office’ | Paul Miller | LinkedIn

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Two weeks ago I was given a tour around the iconic new London headquarters of a large financial services company. They had considered many aspects of the shared working areas, pop-up meeting spaces, quiet areas and how to subtly influence better collaborative working. There is just one problem for this company – and for almost every other large organisation I know that is investing in ‘future workplaces’. No matter how many comfy lounges you have and how good the coffee, workers are voting with their feet and leaving offices.

Source: 5 reasons why ‘no office’ is better than ‘some office’ | Paul Miller | LinkedIn

Just recently came across this thoughtful post by Paul Miller, CEO and founder of the Digital Workplace Group. While many observers of the changing world of knowledge work still see a place for a centralized, commute-in office (CCO), refurbished as a comfortable space to meet up with colleagues and collaborate some part of the work week, Miller sees it as no longer serving a useful purpose.

He even goes as far as to predict the CCO will in the 21st century become an obsolete white elephant. Citing his own company’s experience, Miller argues that organizations that try to adopt a virtual work culture but retain the CCO will suffer an identity crisis of sorts and related in group/out group adverse organizational dynamics.

When you can choose to work anywhere, where will you choose to work? – Workplace Insight

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One of the great questions that hangs over workers in the new era of boundless work is this: When you can choose to work from anywhere, where will you choose to work? It’s not just a question for the growing army of workers who find themselves unfettered from the traditional times and places of work. They will naturally choose to work in the places they feel make them most productive and happy, which nurture their wellbeing and chime with their values. The challenge for the owners and the occupiers of offices is to create the working environments that will draw people to them.

Source: When you can choose to work anywhere, where will you choose to work? – Workplace Insight

This isn’t just a challenge of office design. It’s one of logistics and personal economics since working in an office for most involves considerable time and money spent commuting to and from it. Making the office space more comfortable and inviting does not and cannot address that unless it includes a Star Trek-like transporter room that allows staff to beam in for a meeting. As metro areas grow and become more congested, the problem only grows worse. Knowledge workers will think, “That’s a really cool office, but what a pain and time suck to get there.”

Given the choice on where to regularly work and in the interest of their personal well being, the obvious one for most knowledge workers is as close to home as possible.

The astonishing human potential wasted on commutes – The Washington Post

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According to the Census, there were a little over 139 million workers commuting in 2014. At an average of 26 minutes each way to work, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that works out to something like a total of 1.8 trillion minutes Americans spent commuting in 2014. Or, if you prefer, call it 29.6 billion hours, 1.2 billion days, or a collective 3.4 million years. With that amount of time, we could have built nearly 300 Wikipedias, or built the Great Pyramid of Giza 26 times — all in 2014 alone.Instead, we spent those hours sitting in cars and waiting for the bus. Of course, not all of us have 26-minute commutes. Roughly a quarter of American commutes are less than 15 minutes one way. On the other hand, nearly 17 percent of us have commutes that are 45 minutes or longer. And the prevalence of these long commutes — and of really, really long commutes — is growing.

Source: The astonishing human potential wasted on commutes – The Washington Post

With today’s 21st century information and communications technology, it no longer makes sense for knowledge workers to waste so much time traveling to and from centralized commute-in offices as they did in previous century’s Industrial Age. This article does a great job assigning a personal time cost to the commute.

Organizations have long regarded commuting expense as a cost borne by the employee and not the organization. But there is a significant organizational cost in the adverse impact on employee health and wellness given time spent commuting is time taken away from health promoting behaviors such as exercise, adequate sleep and meals prepared at home rather than take out food. Over time, that can manifest in higher employee health benefit costs, a top cost concern among most employer organizations.

I recently completed a white paper on an alternative workplace wellness concept that utilizes ICT to enable knowledge workers to work in their home communities where they have greater access to these health promoting activities rather than commuting out each workday. I am seeking sponsors for the paper; interested parties can contact me by clicking on the mail button at the top right hand of the site.