You should listen to Ron Sims

Broadband. Telecommuting. Taming our roaring highways instead of multiplying them. Walking or cycling to work. Less tension, better health. "Work to live, not live to work." Could all those values come together?

Put your ear to the ground, and you can hear other voices, especially in new technologies, suggesting a less frenetic lifestyle in a nation clearly confounded by congestion, obesity, energy consumption, global warming and air quality issues.

Biggest on the technology side: broadband Internet connection. Broadband is usually sold for its economic promise; backers now claim that a robust, border-to-border U.S. broadband network would generate up to 1.2 million new jobs.

New uses keep emerging for broadband service, now the world's premier messaging, data source, business, entertainment and video transmitter, and with voice services, a growing competitor to standard telephone lines. With broadband, medical images can be flashed long distances to save lives, schools can be smaller but still receive top-level instruction, images and communications for homeland security are speeded ... the list keeps growing.

But there's de facto "redlining" of geographically remote or poor areas by the "duopoly" of telephone and cable companies — a modern-day version of early 20th-century corporate foot-dragging in delivering telephone and electric service to rural America.

Massachusetts, for example, has 32 towns with no broadband at all, 63 with limited service areas. Enter then the broadband-transportation link. Fast, reliable Internet connection makes telecommuting far more feasible — to transfer files, worksheets and video clips, access company databases, create videocon-ferences and more. But "telework" can't function well when employees don't have broadband access. Simple equation: Universal broadband equals increased telecommuting, which in turn means less roadway demand, fewer greenhouse-gas emissions and less pollution.

Which raises a thorny question: How many new super-road lanes do we need on our highways, anyway? None at all if they raise greenhouse-gas emissions, says King County Executive Ron Sims. Sims opposed a proposal on last week's ballot — $17 billion-plus for a combination of new roads and rail transit in the central Puget Sound region. No good, said Sims — the overall package would have raised the area's carbon-dioxide emissions by 18 million to 28 million tons over the next 50 years. The measure was defeated.

Already, notes Sims, as many greenhouse gases are emitted in Washington state as the Philippines, which has 12 times Washington's population. Metro areas, he says, can't claim they're expanding for economic efficiency "and then go down to Brazil and say please don't cut your tropical rain forest."

Overall reduction of auto use is the challenge, says Sims, which means growth limits — tighter, denser communities: "There's not enough money in the world to meet the maintenance needs of ongoing sprawl."

Sims' highway stand is collaborated by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Institute. Expanded freeways, Litman notes, may cut congestion delays in the short run. But in a few years, congestion generally returns to its earlier level through "induced travel" — more thousands of drivers flooding into roadways they perceive as less crowded. The result: "downstream congestion, road costs, accidents, energy consumption and pollution emissions, and sprawl."

An alternative, says Sims: remote work centers, telecommuting, commuting in off hours, "an array of things so people have a life."

No one should have to commute more than a half-hour from home, Sims suggests. "The human body," he said, "was not designed to be pounded from the stress and strain of long commutes."

Plus, he said, we all need "time with our families, to live." That translates too into time for a mix of exercise and sociability, walking and biking and talking with neighbors — which reasonably compact communities make easier: "We want to tell people, you don't live to work, you work to live."

Heresy in fast-go, roaring-roadway, sprawling America? Maybe so. But let's pause to give it a careful look before we embrace urgent appeals for fresh asphalt.

Neal Peirce's column appears alternate Mondays on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com