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Commute
Getting to work is a whole new trip these days. Or no trip at all
By Peter Loftus
Updated Nov. 13, 2000 12:01 am ET

Angelo Falco remembers the days of a half-century ago when he could drop a 15-cent
token in the turnstile and ride the New York City subway system.

Mr. Falco, a Brooklyn retiree, doesn't need a pocketful of metal tokens these days.
Instead, he swipes a plastic card with a magnetic strip through the turnstile, making his
journeys easier and cheaper. The gizmo, called a MetroCard, gives Mr. Falco 11 rides for
the price of 10, plus free transfers between subways and buses. And he doesn't have to
wait in line for tokens -- he can buy MetroCards at a vending machine.

"I'm always looking for a bargain," says Mr. Falco.

So are lots of other New Yorkers, apparently. Millions of riders have flocked to the
MetroCard since it was fully deployed in 1997, helping to push bus and subway ridership
up 28%. The introduction of unlimited-ride cards last year has helped bring the average
fare down to $1.06 from $1.50 in 1995, making the transit system "one of the few things
in New York City that's getting less expensive," says Al O'Leary, spokesman for the
city's transit agency.

The MetroCard is a clear example of how technology has changed people's commutes in
recent years. Across the country, people are using fare cards to zip through turnstiles -- or
using similar technology to speed through tollbooths. Some cities use high-tech
surveillance to monitor road conditions and check for accidents. And some car makers
use communication systems in their vehicles to give drivers directions -- or automatically
call for help if, say, the air bags are deployed.

But some of the biggest changes in commuting haven't come from technology so directly
aimed at commuting itself. Instead, they've come as a byproduct of other types of gadgets
-- such as cell phones, laptops and the Internet. These are the things that have revamped
the whole nature of commuting, turning cars and trains into mobile offices -- or even
allowing some people to skip their commute altogether.

Drastic Plastic
Paradoxically, for the large majority of American workers who do travel to work, new
technology hasn't made commuting times any shorter. In fact, average commuting times
are longer than ever.

Why? "If you improve commuting, people may take the option of living farther away,
and so what we're getting is, instead of reducing travel time, people are taking improved
housing," says Alan Pisarski, author of two books on commuting trends and a former
planner with the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Indeed, the total number of miles people drive to work more than doubled to 642.6
million in 1995 from 260.7 million in 1969, according to a recent Federal Highway
Administration study. Meanwhile, the length of the average commute edged up to 11.6
miles in 1995 from 8.5 miles in 1983, with average one-way travel time rising to 21
minutes from 18 over the same period. (Ninety percent of American workers drive to
their jobs.)

Small wonder, then, that transportation planners are busy making technological upgrades
with an eye toward cutting travel times. In both mass transit and auto commuting,
automatic fare- and toll-collection systems have been the most visible changes in the past
few years.

In 1993, New York state transportation agencies began installing a system known as E-
ZPass in tollbooths on bridges, tunnels and highways. Drivers buy small cards that attach
to their windshields. As a car drives through the tollbooths, antennas on the booths use
radio frequencies to spot the car's E-ZPass, picking up its unique coding and deducting
the bridge toll from the driver's account. The idea is to let cars move through the
tollbooths more quickly because drivers won't have to come to a complete stop and dig
for change in their pockets. The passes are now available throughout the state. Similar
systems are being deployed in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
In San Francisco, the California Department of Transportation is planning to make its
own version of E-ZPass, FasTrak, available on the seven bridges it operates in the Bay
area. One of the bridges, the Carquinez, has had a pilot FasTrak program since 1997, says
Dennis Trujillo, spokesman for the Transportation Department. So far, he says, the
system has helped improve traffic flow: The FasTrak tollbooths can handle about 1,800
cars an hour, up from 500 for the old booths.

A rail version of FasTrak is in place for riders of the Washington, D.C., subway system,
the Metro. Introduced last year, the SmarTrip cards contain a computer chip that stores
the prepaid fare. But unlike MetroCard in New York, riders don't have to swipe the card
through the turnstile. Instead, they can merely wave the card within a few inches of a
scanner at each turnstile, says Dave DeKozan, vice president of strategic planning at San
Diego-based Cubic Transportation Systems, a Cubic Corp. unit that installed the fare-
collection systems in both Washington and New York.
One benefit of a "contact-less" fare-collection system is that riders don't have to remove
their SmarTrip cards from their wallets or purses, Mr. DeKozan says. Some women, for
example, simply leave the cards in the bottom of their purses and wave their purses over
the turnstile scanner before entering the Metro, he says. Men of a certain height can leave
their wallets in their pants pockets and twist their hips to gain entry. About 40% of the
Metro's one million daily subway and bus riders now use SmarTrip, Mr. DeKozan says.
Cubic recently installed a similar system in Chicago.

Tech Is My Co-Pilot
Cell phones and laptops have become part of the commuting culture so quickly that it's
hard to remember how new they are. But until a few years ago, commuters were pretty
much stuck with reading the newspaper or staring at ads on the train, or listening to music
on a car stereo. Now, commuting is just an extension of the business day, with cell
phones putting people in touch with their offices, and customers and laptops helping them
finish up work while they travel.

Paul Tenuta drives his car nearly 30 miles each way to his downtown Chicago office
from his suburban home in Orland Park, Ill. While driving on the expressways, he and
many other drivers are talking on their cell phones. "It's one gigantic conference call,"
says Mr. Tenuta, a senior principal with Diamond Technology Partners Inc., an
information-technology consulting firm.

Mr. Tenuta spends as much as three hours in his car commuting each day, but it's no
longer wasted time, he says. He had a cell phone at the start of his career in the early
1990s, but the phone was a big, bulky model and the rates were so high that he didn't use
it very much while commuting. Instead, he listened to the radio or to tapes of music he
had recorded as an amateur musician.

Now cell-phone rates are cheaper -- and Mr. Tenuta can be in constant touch with his
clients and co-workers. He estimates that he's now on the phone for more than half of his
commute. On some mornings, he participates in conference calls while driving in. Having
a phone in the car also lets him stay in touch with his wife and son from the road -- not to
mention keeping up with college buddies and other friends he wouldn't have a chance to
call otherwise. In the past, he didn't keep in close contact with these old friends because
by the time he arrived home, he had time only to eat dinner, put his son to bed and then
retire himself.

"It's absolutely a positive thing," Mr. Tenuta says of the use of cell phones while driving.
"But as with any positive thing, it can be overused."

Making Jams Tolerable

Indeed, he says he feels less safe while commuting because cell phones can distract
drivers. And he believes the widespread use of cell phones in cars contributes to
congestion because some motorists stuck in traffic aren't paying attention when traffic
picks up. He acknowledges that he's guilty of some of these problems, though he has
occasionally pulled to the side of the road during calls.

Cell phones have other, less obvious downsides, experts say. By making even the most
congested roads more tolerable, there's less incentive for people to avoid rush-hour jams.
In turn, that makes the roads more crowded. And that can mean a commuting nightmare
for people who can't do their work on the road, such as carpenters or factory workers.
"It has divided the commuting world into people who are more inconvenienced by
delays, accidents and uncertainties, and those who are not," says Ron Kirby, director of
transportation planning at the National Capital Transportation Planning Board.

Other communications technologies for the car are on the rise -- but they're not for
business calls. About 375,000 drivers of cars made by General Motors Corp. are using a
two-way, in-car communications system called OnStar, first introduced in 1997
Cadillacs. After pressing a few buttons on the dashboard or below the rear-view mirror,
drivers are patched through to an adviser in one of OnStar's customer-service centers. The
service is designed to help drivers whose cars break down or get in an accident.
The OnStar centers can automatically detect when an air bag is deployed, and then they
notify local emergency officials. OnStar also features a satellite-based technology called
global positioning system, or GPS, that can tell emergency officials exactly where the car
is located. Other features include stolen-vehicle tracking, diagnostic services and a door-
unlock mechanism.

'Speaking to the Car'

GM expects to have built one million OnStar-equipped cars by the end of 2000, says
Todd Carstensen, an OnStar spokesman. Starting this fall, drivers can use the OnStar
system to make cell-phone calls without taking their hands off the steering wheel, using
voice-recognition technology. OnStar will also read e-mail messages to drivers.

"It's all hands-free," Mr. Carstensen says. "You're actually just speaking to the car. The
adviser's voice, or the prerecorded voice, comes over the speakers."

One person who won't be needing any of those innovations is Monica Logani. Earlier this
year, the former Lehman Brothers research analyst was lured to a job as an Internet
analyst at Pittsburgh-based Federated Investment Management Cos. with the promise that
she could work from her home in Rumson, N.J.

A new mother with a baby son, Ms. Logani now has a home office with two personal
computers, two printers, a few phones and a high-speed Internet connection. The Web
hookup, supplied by Excite At Home Corp. , gives her constant access to Federated's
internal computer system. She uses e-mail and the phone "all day long" to communicate
with portfolio managers back in Pittsburgh.
Ms. Logani now has three extra hours each day that she used to spend commuting to and
from Lehman Brothers' New York offices. As a result, she works longer hours, but still
has more time for her son.

Way to Balance
"More companies have to be willing to deploy this," she says. "There are so many well-
educated women who, when they have kids, leave the labor force. It's not because they
want to, but because they don't always have the option of balancing work and home."

Policy wonks have talked for years about telecommuting as a solution to gridlock and a
way to give employees more flexibility. But in recent years, the emergence of high-speed
Internet connections and e-mail have made the practice much more feasible.

For example, Mr. Kirby, the transportation planner, estimates that about 3.5% percent of
workers in the Washington, D.C., area are telecommuting on any given day. He thinks
that can rise to 6% by 2005, as high-speed Web connections proliferate and more workers
demand the option. Even if employees work from home as little as one day a month,
telecommuting can help reduce traffic congestion, he says.

Telecom technology also means businesses -- especially service-oriented, information-

based companies -- can locate almost anywhere. And that can mean easier commutes for
employees.

Take Montgomery County, Pa., northwest of Philadelphia. Michael Stokes, assistant

director of the county planning commission, says that for more than a decade, housing
construction has boomed in areas more than 20 miles from the city's downtown. Mr.
Stokes says many of these new residents commute to Philadelphia, but many also go to
King of Prussia, a hub of suburban office parks and retail outlets.

"It's no longer the case that people are concentrated in the inner-ring suburban areas, but
also houses are being built in the far northwest part of the county," he says.
Things to Come
Commuters can expect more technological changes in the future. Several mass-transit
systems are planning to install GPS technology on buses, which will allow transit
operators to deploy the vehicles more efficiently across a city. And the systems could be
used to install digital displays at bus stops telling passengers when the next bus will
arrive.

Gene Russianoff, a spokesman for the Straphangers Campaign, a watchdog group for the
New York transit system, says he envisions a day when GPS will be used to notify bus
riders via cell phone about pending bus arrivals.

There could be more uses for systems like California's FasTrak and Washington's
SmarTrip. These cards and transponders could be used for everything from parking fees
to paying for fast food at drive-in windows, says Mr. Trujillo, the California
Transportation Department spokesman.

Mr. Pisarski, the former federal transportation planner, says traffic-management systems
will become more prevalent. By tying traffic lights, road sensors and cameras into central
networks, traffic engineers will be able to make more efficient use of existing roadways,
as opposed to widening roads or building new ones.

"Technology has a real role to play in the future of commuting," Mr. Pisarski says. "If
you were to widely deploy all the technologies that are now available, there would be a
15% to 20% improvement in road capacity. We haven't seen a tremendous amount of
benefits yet, though."

-- Mr. Loftus is a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires in New York.

Write to Peter Loftus at peter.loftus@dowjones.com