I was driving into Toronto last week and encountered the usual traffic jam, which stretches from Burlington to downtown in the morning and the reverse in the afternoon. This turns what would ordinarily be a 40 min trip into a two-hour ordeal.

Of course sitting in an air-conditioned car when the outside temperature is 35 with a humidex of 40 is a blessing – you begin to enjoy the long drive. Especially when like me you don’t have air conditioning in your home.

The Toronto highways are equipped with helpful overhead led signs that flash different messages like “amber alert” or “don’t drive and talk on your cell phone” “seatbelts save lives” “War Is Peace”, “Freedom Is Slavery”, “Ignorance Is Strength” and occasionally some information about traffic problems. Although telling you that traffic is extremely slow when you are already stuck in slow traffic is not a real mood elevator.

Anyway this particular day was one where we were under a smog alert. We have a lot of alerts in Toronto now: Smog, heat, humidity, cold, etc.

So as I passed under one of these helpful signs and noticed that today’s message was “smog alert: reduce vehicle use”.

Imagine that. Telling me to reduce my vehicle use when I am stuck in gridlock. Should I have gotten out of my car and started walking? Would that have helped? I guess the degree of chaos caused by my now driverless vehicle would cancel out my good will gesture but at least my heart would have been in the right place - much like the sign. But of course no good would have come out of it. Such is our society today that good intentions are more important than results.

So the radio and the highway signs tell us to reduce vehicle use during smog alerts and everyone nods and says “yes capital idea” and then we all jump in our cars.

Of course there isn’t really an alternative is there? During these heat waves the instructions given to the general populace are to reduce traffic by car pooling or taking transit.

Car-pooling however isn’t much of an option since the city is so spread out and just because your neighbours live in Markham and work in Toronto there is no guarantee they are going to the same part of town that you are.

As for transit – crowded airless malodorous and sometimes dangerous trains and buses are not only an insult to the civialized man and woman they are quite often slower than taking the car.

And yet there is another alternative to this that would not only reduce vehicle use but it would also make people much more productive.

Telecommuting.

Why aren’t people urged to work from home on smog alert days? They are asked to do so during blizzards. If we could get 20% of the vehicles off the road during smog alerts it would have a wondrous effect.

In the first place it would almost certainly eliminate the pollution emitted by those cars since they would be sitting silently in the driveway. Secondly with less cars on the road there would be less congestion therefore less idling vehicles and less smog!

Yet I don’t hear our Lord Mayor advising such a thing.

Why?

Look if you spend most of your day answering email and talking on the phone you can work from anywhere. I have been working from a home office since 1990 and I find I am much more productive that way.

Of course some employers are a little reticent to do this – they seem to think that their employees will goof off. Yet they have no compunction about offshoring thousands of jobs to some unknown and unseen group of people halfway around the world.

Surely they can trust you all to do some form of productive work?

Now not everyone can work from home. Some people don’t have an office and others with small kids just can’t manage it. And of course if you work in manufacturing you can’t build cars from your home office.

But I bet 20% of us can.

Think about it. Does your company have a policy on telecommuting? Maybe it’s time you started talking about it.

And if any policy makers are reading this feel free to steal this idea. I have more important things to do anyway.

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