This post is not solely about telecommuting. Rather it is on one of the chief motivations for telecommuting. What triggered this was an article by Paulo Cabral on BBC News Magazine about traffic problems in São Paolo. The article focuses on the travails of a young mother who, according to Murphy’s Law of Commuting, lives on one side of the city while her work is on the opposite side. She is often in the position of having to commute two hours each way with her youngest son with her in the car. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s not all bad news. There is love in line.

However [our heroine, Fabiana Crespo,] also knows that it is a certain irony that it was in one of those terrible congestions nine years ago that she met the man she would eventually marry.
“I was with a friend in my car and he was in his car also with a friend. In the stop and go of the traffic jam we started driving side by side and then he started looking at me,” says Crespo.
After some flirting through the car windows, Mauricio managed to convince Fabiana to give him her phone number. He called, and an enduring love story began.
“I think this is the only thing we can’t complain about in Sao Paulo’s traffic”, she says.

Having recently been in rush hour traffic in Bogotá, Colombia, I suspect that it is much the same as in São Paolo, not to mention many other cities. In fact, neither Bogotá nor São Paolo are on the list of the world’s most congested cities. Furthermore, since half the world’s growing human population now lives in cities—and aspire to own cars—such stories are sure to increase in number.

The big question, of course, is: Why are we still doing this? A few weeks more than forty years ago I moved to the University of Southern California with the goal, among others, of starting some research on the practicality of substituting telecommunications and computer technologies—telecommuting—for that daily, dreary commute to work. The subsequent research project, and many more that followed it, demonstrated that telecommuting has positive results for all concerned: the telecommuters; their employers; their families and their communities. The bottom line improves for all participants. Properly designed and implemented telecommuting programs will have similar results in Mexico City, Beijing, São Paolo, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Tokyo and everywhere else that has the infrastructure to support it.

The exploding popularity of social networks also shows that there is also love on line. So what are we waiting for?