🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 9 Sep 1995, Richard Aleksander wrote:

> 
> 
> On 6 Sep 1995, Gene Crick wrote:
> 
> > Interested in TELECOMMUTING?
> > 
> > Here is a summary (5 pp.) with excerpts from a report to be presented
> > to the Austin Transportation Study's Policy Advisory Committee on 9/11.
> > Theme is Telecommuting as an option for Austin's future transit plans.
> > If you have any comments or suggestions: gcrick@sqi.utexas.edu
> > 
> <many lines deleted>
>  
> > Telecommuting Improves Air Quality
> > ----------------------------------
> > This study found major and significant decreases in auto emissions on
> > telecommuting days: emissions of organic gases - 64% lower; oxides of
> > nitrogen - 73% lower; carbon monoxide - 63% lower; number of cold starts -
> > 60% fewer.  The study found 73% decrease in distance traveled by autos. 
> > The findings point to an important advantage of telecommuting - reductions
> > in auto emissions and improvements in air quality. 
> > 
> Details please.  Do these figures result from having everyone 
> hypothetically telecommuting?  The longest running program to cut single 
> passenger trips (Pleasanton CA) only decreased them 4-5%.  Where do these 
> numbers come from?
> 
> 
This was, substantially, the entire study report.  Nowhere does it 
describe how the figures were obtained, other than they came from the 
web (sometime in 1991),

What we are missing here is a report on how much telecommuting would cut 
the number of car trips, what percentage of the total working public 
could, conceivably telecommute.  In short, all of the assumptions made in 
calculating these figures were deleted.

What if I told you that Capital Metro cuts pollution by 63% or that using 
birth control cuts births by 63%?  You would ask, under what conditions 
do those figures arise.  Then, why has pollution continued, why is the 
birth rate not declining?  

In the case of one California program using all modalities to cut single 
passenger car trips, since 1991 single trips have been reduced by only 4% 
(from their goal of 45%.  

What is needed is to show employers how to use it and how best to 
encourage people to do it.