Telecommuting Breaks Transportation, Pt. 1: False Positives
By: Mitch Turck
Tags: Transportation, Urban Planning, Remote Working, Remote Work, Future Of Work

Credit: Freepik (composite image)

This multi-part series addresses core concepts in telecommuting’s impact on transportation; concepts which have gone largely dismissed by the very experts who fund, plan, and build our nation. For more, see Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

False Positives

A false positive is an incorrect indication that something is present, due to any number of factors such as a faulty test or flawed analysis. An illusion, to put it crudely. The problem is encountered constantly in the medical field, but the models we build our transportation networks on are just as susceptible.

Consider the Amtrak Acela train: America’s only high-speed rail service, hauling customers along the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, DC as a smart alternative to air travel. The Acela was among the first transportation services to shutter in the wake of Coronavirus, with Amtrak announcing suspended service on March 7th — two weeks before any city on the train’s route had issued a stay-at-home order.

On its surface, such a proactive decision might seem either prescient or overblown, depending on whom we ask. But the picture takes on a much more practical clarity once we observe the demographics of Acela ridership: 73% of riders use it as a tool to conduct business as usual. When business becomes unusual (say, in a pandemic or recession), the train’s viability comes into question — regardless of how many people rely on it to attend school, commute to jobs, or visit loved ones. Suffice it to say, a permanent shift to mass telecommuting would make a rather pronounced dent in “business as usual.”

Source: Amtrak

In fairness, one might make the argument that any subsidized transportation mode would suffer under extreme circumstances. But few modes rely on such a one-dimensional demographic as the Acela, and even fewer operate under an illusion that could dissolve in an instant, should its customers switch to a steady diet of working from home.

The question becomes one of false positives: how many Acela customers show up simply because we’ve designed a convoluted commerce environment to generate such customers? How many of these trips would shift to telecommuting if we stopped suspending our disbelief in the model? Amtrak presumably found out some time around March 7th.

All of this matters a great deal to Amtrak, because the Acela is not only its crown jewel… it’s the company’s framework for staying afloat.

In short, the entirety of Amtrak’s future rests on the assumption that more businesses are going to send more employees hours from home on a regular basis to demonstrate a product or shake a hand. To be clear, Amtrak’s current ridership is obviously very real; it is the projected ridership in its long-term strategy that contains some potentially disastrous ratio of false positives.

The primary logic behind Amtrak’s sustainability strategy is:

The Northeast Corridor is our only truly profitable route; it would be wise to replicate it Cities are growing and becoming more congested; ergo, we can build replicant models to serve those regions as their automotive traffic patterns and labor demographics start to resemble the Northeast Corridor

Source: Amtrak (via Bloomberg)

Whether the state-owned Amtrak corporation ought to be profitable is its own question, but that is indeed management’s pursuit. Under 20th century logic, it would be an entirely reasonable strategy to reframe one’s business model around occasional business customers: people who will gladly take convenience at a premium, since they’re spending someone else’s money.

But such logic rests on an assumption that purse strings are loose in their natural state, when in fact, their natural state is anything but. Forget the threat of an Acela rider’s employer deciding videoconferencing will be de facto policy in the wake of the pandemic; business travel only exists because there is someone on the other side of the trip to welcome it. If clients continue to advise more personnel to work from home, a vendor meeting on-site becomes an inconvenience (in poor taste no less). The question is, how many necessary trips remain when the per diem bubble bursts?

Thus, the matter of false positives as a tipping point. When a new train shows up to shuttle business travelers from Atlanta to Charlotte, Dallas to Houston, or Cleveland to Pittsburgh, how many of the projected riders will be on board? That all depends on how flawed the projection is — and given zero mentions of telecommuting as a variable in this long-term strategy, it’s worth considering the flaw might be fatal.