Congestion Blues

My average work commute speed is about 8mph*, which is just better than the average London rushour car journey at 7mph - worse than the horse and cart achieved at the start of the 20th Century.

Cars are great so what's went wrong? Well the problem is the tarmac and the fact that we all want to use the same bit at the same time. So if that's the problem then what are the possible answers?

- Build more roads - yet studies have shown that new roads encourage people off public transport and into cars with no net benefit to congestion.
- Build great public transport - yet most governments are too bankrupt to fund the sort of public works programs required to make major infrastructure improvements here.
- Work from home - the best commute is the one you don't have to take. With boadband and mobile technology we have the infrastructure and tools that enables us to really embrace this solution, but so far it's only a minority solution.

So what's this got to do with IT? The answer is below:

- Build more roads - is the equivalent of building more interfaces between our systems. Except that in our case each road is made from different materials, using different construction techniques, different traffic lights and different road signs.
- Better public transport - is the equivalent of building an enterise bus architecture. A great potential solution but still very costly and complex.
- Work from home - back in my earlier post "Redundancy Blues" I lamented the lack of the single corporate database. Imagine if all the data our company held was in one database. We would ensure that it ran on the best hardware, backup and recovery would be easy, we wouldn't need to build data warehouses to try to discover a single version of the truth. In short,if we had realised the potential benefits offered to us by Open Systems we'd be in a far better place than we are today.

Oh, well, must go and get my pick axe. I'm building a new road today.

*Please note that I consider myself very lucky that my commute is only half an hour. Across the world many, many people spend about 2+ hours per day commuting to work and back - that's about 25% of the time that they are actually there!