Metro Atlanta’s commute has a new favored route: the information highway.
For the first time, state data shows teleworking has surpassed all alternatives to solo driving here as a main commute, including carpooling and mass transit.
Last year, 7 percent of all metro Atlanta commuters teleworked for the majority of their commutes, a three-quarters increase over 2007, according to state Department of Transportation contractors. The percentage of commuters who telework as just an occasional option also rose, up by a third since 2007, the last time DOT studied the issue.
Make no mistake, Atlanta’s heart still belongs to the car, with 82 percent of commuters driving alone. But that’s down slightly from 2007, when the state’s last survey said 85 percent drove alone.
If Susan Rae's work day allows a telecommute, she's taking it, "hands down," she said.
"To me it’s the waste of an hour and a half drive every day in traffic," said Rae, a communications director who telecommutes three or four days a week for Roam Atlanta, a business she helped found in Alpharetta. Roam has an office where she could work all the time if she wanted, she said, but she prefers her home office in northeast Cobb County.
While she wishes the dog wouldn’t bark while she’s on a conference call, “People are used to that now,” she said. “We laugh and I say I’m just working from home. So many people are on flexible work situations these days, they understand.”
Indeed, it's not the latest Internet gadget that caused the recent surge, teleworkers told the AJC, but rather a culture change among nontechie bosses who can green light a telework program.
In 2010, Forbes.com listed Atlanta as the second most "wired" city in the nation, citing the percentage of homes with broadband and other factors.
Adam Fenton, who teleworks one day a week as a manager of the High Museum's website, thinks the proliferation of broadband in homes, and of smart devices in pockets, has made working remotely seem normal to top business managers.
"The ways you do it have been out there for 10 years or more," said Fenton, who lives in Newnan and got the green light to telework in 2008. "But the understanding in order to make an informed decision hasn’t really been there until the last couple years."
The next runner-up to teleworking for a main commute alternative in 2010 was vanpooling and carpooling, which claimed 5 percent of commuters. In 2007, vanpooling/carpooling was the top alternative to driving alone.
While the sagging economy caused an overall decrease in commuters, the number of people taking an alternative commute has risen, according to the study.
The state surveyed 4,000 people who are not self-employed and who work for a business that is not based at home.
The state's data over time is sparse, but teleworking has consistently increased over the years, said Alan Pisarski, a Virginia-based commuting expert. State studies in 2001 and 2002 were done differently than the current ones, and they showed less than 5 percent of the area's commuting was done by telework.
The U.S. Census showed 5.6 percent of metro Atlantans worked at home in 2009. That figure didn't detail commutes that split between home and work, and it covered a larger metro area than the 20-county area in the state study.
Representatives of the Clean Air Campaign released the recent study results. The campaign, funded by the state DOT, federal grants and private donations, pays metro Atlantans $3 a day to switch from solo driving to greener commutes.
Kevin Green, the campaign's director, said the number of weekly telecommuters is about equal to the number of people who drive the Downtown Connector each day. "I think the impact of telework is more than most people realize," he said.
One big boost for the change, apparently, was the 2008 gas price spike.
"Four-dollar-a-gallon gas was the breaking point for me," said Dawne Dawson, a customer service analyst at Georgia Power who started telecommuting in October 2008, and kept at it two days a week after prices fell back down.
"An extra hour’s sleep is nice, you can be a little more comfortable at home, and you're uninterrupted," she said. Georgia Power credits teleworkers for helping keep its phone bank operating when the ice storm shut down metro Atlanta's road grid in January, spokeswoman Carol Boatright said.
Denise Kenson-Liu, an Internet manager for Gwinnett County, started telecommuting one day a week in late 2007 because of efficiency, not gas prices. She said one obstacle was the question of whether workers actually work at home. To build trust, she supplied her bosses with her agenda for the day, and at the end of the day gave them a scorecard of what she had and hadn't accomplished. It's worked well, she said.
"My husband always tells me I'm a lot calmer on Friday," Kenson-Liu said. "That's because I'm not being interrupted every five minutes. I know I can accomplish what I plan to accomplish. My schedule won't get changed; it's a lot more relaxing for me."
Going Remote
Sources: Center for Transportation and the Environment, Clean Air Campaign, GDOT, Cookerly Public Relations
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