From Transitory States to Innovation Permanence
Hyperloop has been in the news with expectations that a trip between Sydney and Melbourne would take less than 1 hour. There is also talk of the next generation aircraft using the Sabre engine that will reduce the flying time between Sydney and London to 4 hours. We are not quite at the teleportation stage….yet. All this talk of expedited travel times across long distances is fine but what about closer to home?
The productivity costs of the daily commute in Australia are expected to reach $53B by 2030. We give up approximately three weeks a year of our working lives commuting. That’s over two years across a 40 year career.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-09/commuting-times-travel-shorten/6592510
About a decade ago I contemplated writing to the Prime Minister to suggest that it might benefit the country if he mandated one day a week to working at home for those employees where their role allowed it. I was working in the unified communications and contact centre technology space at that time. IP telephony had been around since the beginning of the millennium and the internet was reaching a point where connectivity at home enabled this to occur.
I believe my thinking was also influenced by the days I worked out of the office in North Ryde. My commute to work meant that I travelled down the Mona Vale Road and to ensure that I didn’t spend a disproportionate amount of my time in the car, I’d leave at 07:00 in the morning enabling me to be at my desk by 07:30. When you spend ten years travelling the same journey, you pick up certain traffic trends such as Tuesday is always the busiest. It would only take a matter of minutes beyond my normal time of leaving or a minor incident to ensure that the commute was increased exponentially.
Due to the amount of intrastate as well as interstate travel that my role required, I would find myself heading along the M2 towards Canberra early mornings and every now and then consciously think about the amount of cars travelling the other direction. I felt like I could be driving for half an hour and still the opposite lane would be crawling along towards the city.
In Sydney, over 2,000,000 commuters drive to work each day, of which 87% spend less than 45 minutes commuting whilst the remaining 13% spend over 45 minutes . The average is approximately 35 minutes. That equates to 1 hour 10 minutes every day.
Now, what if I had written that letter to the PM?
What if Parliament had passed legislation that meant employers were incentivised to assist employees to work from home one day a week? If we presume that only half of the workforce could actually work from home, then that would be 10% of the traffic removed from the roads. What would 200,000 less car trips have meant to the environment? What would that have meant to the well being of the motorists travelling to and from work? What would that have meant to the number of accidents that occur every morning? What would that have done to your petrol costs? What would that have done for your insurance premium? What would……………
I never wrote that letter……
One idea; one innovation; big difference……maybe.
Last week the NSW Government launched its Innovation Strategy and I attended the launch event hosted by the AIIA. One of the initiatives is the NSW Innovation Concierge referred to as NIC (https://www.innovation.nsw.gov.au/work-with-us/ask-nic), where NSW Government related innovative queries/proposals can be submitted in order that they can be responded to efficiently and channeled to the right areas for consideration. https://www.innovation.nsw.gov.au/work-with-us/ask-nic. Taking the successful innovative approach of Service NSW and applying the same principles to the NIC, innovation in Government can move into mainstream thinking.
Maybe it's time to write that letter.