Telecommunications enables humans to communicate remotely rather than travel to common meeting locations. Telecommunications allows sporting, entertainment, political, religious, and other events to be broadcast to a dispersed audience instead of having the audience travel to the event. Telecommunications enables observations from dispersed sites to be collected and transmitted to a central point via remote sensing rather than by a human observer. Telecommunications enables the potential traveler to lay the foundation for more productive travel through remote negotiation, fact finding, or troubleshooting that sometimes makes a trip unnecessary. This communication replaces unconditional travel in anticipation of a need that has only a possibility of arising.
Telecommunications allows consumers to make purchases without traveling to store locations.
This permits the movement of goods to bypass the transportation-intensive process of wholesale and retail distribution. Teleconferencing, computer networks, electronic document flows, and remote sensing let organizational managers disperse and rearrange work sites in a way that can potentially reduce transportation of employees, customers, raw materials, or products. Still, net travel reduction is not necessarily a goal of management decisions to implement new teleservice and telework applications. Pursuing other goals, such as gaining market share or improving quality, may work to increase net trip making. Telecommunications allows service transactions and events to be carried out in ways that require no travel or less travel.