Telecommuting offers hope for region choking on traffic backups

Damn this traffic jam

How I hate to be late

It hurts my motor to go so slow ...

Well I left my job about 5 o'clock

It took fifteen minutes to go three blocks

Just in time to stand in line

With a freeway looking like a parking lot.

Not much has changed in the 29 years since James Taylor recorded those lyrics for "Traffic Jam."

Indeed, the rush-hour crawl has been increasing in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past two years — a kind of perverse economic indicator of the local recovery from the 2000-01 tech bust.

Traffic is getting so bad that chief executive officers are coming to regard congestion as an obstacle to doing business.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group released results last week from a December-January survey of 107 area CEOs on the regional business climate.

Asked to pick the top five "business challenges" in Silicon Valley, high housing costs topped the list — just like last year — with 88 percent of the vote.

Traffic shot to second place, up from ninth the year before.

"The economy is improving. We're starting to hire again. And traffic is coming back," said Bill Coleman, the CEO of Cassatt, a San Jose, Calif., software company, and the chairman of the Leadership Group's board of directors.

Traffic was unbearable at the height of the dot-com and telecommunications bubble, Coleman recalled Wednesday, but everyone was making so much money that they tolerated the delays.

Then the roads suddenly cleared. Massive job cuts are a powerful traffic-reduction tool.

Taillights turned red again in 2004.

In September, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission said travel delays due to congestion in 2004 increased 2 percent in the Bay Area from the year before. That ended a three-year winning streak for commuters — delays had dropped 12 percent in 2001, 5 percent in 2002 and 18 percent in 2003.

Commission spokesman John Goodwin said statistics for 2005 won't be ready until the end of March. But another increase is expected.

So commutes are getting longer. Workers are getting cranky about the extra time stolen from their days.

And CEOs are getting nervous about recruiting and retaining highly skilled employees. After all, there are lots of good tech jobs in relatively low-traffic regions such as Portland and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

Unfortunately, there's no immediate solution short of another major recession. Coleman recommends more rapid transit and more affordable housing near Silicon Valley jobs.

More than likely, however, high housing costs will continue to push homebuyers farther from their workplaces. Despite Coleman's enthusiasm, mass transit is a poor alternative in the valley, where offices are spread across the landscape.

Perhaps the best hope is the very thing Silicon Valley is good at: technology.

High-speed Internet access and inexpensive computers are making it practical for more people to work at home, at least part of the time.

Sun Microsystems is a leading example. Half the company's 31,000 employees worldwide participate in a program called iWork. They work at home or at company-owned drop-in centers.

Sun, based in Santa Clara, Calif., estimates it saves $69 million a year in the United States alone on real-estate costs. Sun says employees participating in iWork are happier and that they give 60 percent of their saved commute time back to the company.

"Telework" isn't for everyone. Obviously, surgeons and police officers can't do their jobs from home. Still, making telework widely available could keep rush hour from collapsing into gridlock.

Mike Langberg is a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News.