Way back in ancient times, about 1982, plans were being made in Los Angeles for hosting the 1984 Olympics. As an applied futurist, one of my concerns was with the potential traffic problems. After all, we expected millions of people to converge on LA during the Olympic games, and LA was already known to have certain traffic-related problems: massive traffic jams, smog, irate motorists and resulting mayhem. Although the area was famous for its extensive freeway system it was clear that one can only fit so many cars into a given space. Add a million or so more cars, stir, and the result would be total chaos. Even spreading the games among several widely separated venues might not help; the cars still had to get to the sites. Furthermore, the mass transit systems were not likely to be able to fill the transportation needs without enormous expenditures for new equipment that probably would not be used after the games. My colleagues were forecasting total gridlock.

What to do?

First the basics. It is not possible to have business as usual everywhere if you’re adding even a few tens of thousands of cars to the equation. Something needs to change. As it turns out, we had been testing one of those forms of change for about ten years: if you want to add cars from somewhere else—without totally rebuilding the highway and parking infrastructure—you have to remove cars that otherwise would be there. But, during normal times, most of the cars in the crowded areas belong to workers and it’s not a great idea to remove the workers; employers tend to complain—as do employees when they don’t get paid. So, how do you get the cars out without removing the workers?

Get them all to take the train or bus? Fine, if that is a reasonable option. But in Los Angeles, where the norm was for everyone to drive alone to work, that was not a reasonable option. Millions of dollars had been spent on plans to pry Angelenos out of their cars. The result? Instead of 97% of the workers driving to work alone, the number was reduced to 93%. That leaves a lot of workers and a lot of cars congesting the very areas that we needed to keep open for Olympic attendees.

My recommendation was to do two things: change some working hours and start telecommuting. In the first case the idea was to have the workers come to—or leave from—work during hours that would not interfere with Olympic traffic. In the second case we wanted employees to stay out of cars altogether by working at (or within walking distance of) home—telecommuting. They would still be working the same hours, just not in the congested regions. Their cars would stay at home and off the roads. Everyone would be happy; the tourists, the workers, the employers.

Why would telecommuting work? Simple. Because 3 of every five Angeleno are information—that is, office—workers. Much of the time their work is performed over the telephone or with a computer. During those times there’s no particular reason why they have to be in a downtown office; they could be at home or some other place where their trip to work doesn’t create traffic congestion. Of course, some of the time they also need to meet face-to-face with co-workers, vendors, or clients. The challenge was to schedule those times as well so as to minimize conflicts with Olympic traffic. All that was needed was to change the location of work, not the work itself.

Well, it worked. We don’t have accurate statistics on how many telecommuters and how many flexible schedule workers there were, although several large downtown companies did both. But there was about a 4% reduction in peak hour traffic in LA during the Olympics—even with the extra load of competitors and spectators—and traffic flowed much more smoothly than it did before the games. Telecommuting was a success.

[Note: In case you’re confused by the terminology, teleworking refers to any form of substituting telecommunications for work-related travel. Some teleworkers do it globally. Telecommuting is that part of teleworking that involves reducing or eliminating the daily trips between home and the principal workplace. That is, telecommuting concentrates on reduction in local morning and evening travel—the main objective for the Olympics. All telecommuters are teleworkers but not all teleworkers are telecommuters. OK?]

Fast forward 12 years. The folks in Atlanta were determined to make the 1996 Olympics go as well as those in Los Angeles in 1984. Like LA, they expected hundreds of thousands of visitors during a short span of time. Worse, the venues for the Olympic games were much more concentrated than were those in LA, and the freeway system around Atlanta is much less extensive than LA’s. Therefore, unless business was much, much different than usual, total gridlock would surely ensue. The task of getting workers out of their cars began in deadly seriousness in the early 1990s.

A number of civic-minded groups came together to help avoid the impending disaster. One of them was the Metropolitan Atlanta Telecommuting Advisory Council (MATAC), one of the regional chapters of ITAC, the International Teleworking Association and Council. [ITAC, by the way, had its roots in the pre-Olympic planning period in Los Angeles.] MATACs mission was to get the message about telecommuting out to local businesses so that they would consider adopting telecommuting for their employees—at least during the games.

A major player in this traffic reduction effort was the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. During the year or two preceding the Olympics the Chamber sponsored a series of Business as Usual seminars, explaining how businesses could use telecommuting, ridesharing, flexible hours and related options to keep their employees working without adding to the impending traffic problems. Emphasis of these seminars was on the businesses that were located within "the ring," a circle with a 2 km radius around the center of Atlanta (where 20 venues, the main Olympic Village, the main Press Center, the International Broadcast Center, and the Olympic Family hotel were located). As a result of the seminars, 1,700 businesses developed business as usual plans.

A series of "Telecommute the Games" workshops were sponsored by MATAC and various vendors to address the issues raised during the Business As Usual seminars. These workshops helped explain how telecommuting could help them make their businesses even more productive, in addition to just keeping them operating during the Olympics.

Some results (and sources of statements) of all of this preparation?

You may have noticed that Jakarta traffic isn’t getting any better, even without demonstrations by students or other activities as Indonesia reinvents itself. A new form of entrepreneurship has arisen: kids are hiring themselves out as extra bodies to qualify for the HOV lanes, helping harried drivers get to work—and themselves to school. Workers are increasingly stressed by the traffic. Air pollution goes with the traffic congestion. Your lungs, as well as your nerves are assaulted. The only good news is that Jakarta isn’t hosting the Olympics in 1999!

Yet Indonesia has certainly entered the information age. A rapidly growing proportion of Indonesians comprises information workers. The telephone infrastructure is in place. The Internet is here and the sales of personal computers and modems are rising. Moving the work to the workers, instead of moving the workers to work, doesn’t require any major, expensive government projects. It doesn’t require new roads. It doesn’t require foreign investment. All it takes is rethinking how the information world works.

My experience in Los Angeles and many other cities leads me to believe another empirical law of humanity: freeway traffic always grows to exceed the capacity of whatever is available. That is, more roads will simply generate even more traffic—to wherever the roads go. A growing proportion of the work force in Jakarta, Jogja, and other large Indonesian cities, is very similar—in terms of the work they perform—to those of LA and Atlanta. Therefore, it is very important for Indonesians to investigate telecommuting, not only as a survival tactic for Jakarta business life, but for a prosperous and peaceful future as well.

Now I’ll tell you a very important secret: telecommuting works because telecommuting pays. When we first started testing telecommuting, in 1973, my first consideration was that it had to be in the best interests of the employers, as well as the traffic-stressed employees, if it was to last. All of our tests of other real life telecommuting projects in the 25 years since our first one demonstrated that both employer and employee can gain significant economic benefits from properly designed telecommuting programs. By the way, telework is also a way to move jobs out of the congested cities to where the workers now live—or would like to live.

As long as Indonesia is reinventing itself, why not include some 21^st century options in the process. Think about it. Now is a good time to start changing the world.