During the thick of the winter storms that battered Virginia many companies let employees work from home.
Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation executive director Thelma Drake said that helped keep the state’s economy afloat.
Now local transportation leaders are hoping that telecommuting can help relieve traffic gridlock in Hampton Roads. At a conference Wednesday sponsored by the Department of Rail and Public Transportation and Hampton Roads Transit, local leaders examined strategies to get more businesses to adopt the practice.
E. Dana Dickens III, president of Hampton Roads Partnership, repeated an often-used illustration by transportation planners. “If every daily user of the Downtown Tunnel reduced their usage by one trip per week,” Dickens said. “You’d see a 20 percent reduction in congestion and traffic would flow pretty smoothly.”
Dickens said tax incentives must be used to spur businesses to use telecommuting. “What that dollar [amount] is I don’t know,” Dickens said. Gov. Bob McDonnell has advocated increasing telecommuting as part of his transportation plan.
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