Telecommuting Breaks Transportation, Pt. 4: Path Dependence

This multi-part series addresses core concepts in telecommuting’s impact on transportation; concepts which have gone largely dismissed by the very experts who fund, plan, and build our nation. For more, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Path Dependence

Path dependence is the limiting effect prior decisions have on the availability of future choices; at its most severe, a choice made today may unwittingly lock someone out of any alternative opportunities down the road. None of this is news to transportation officials, as the consequences of path dependence in urban planning can often be observed quite literally.

If the shorthand definition for path dependence is “history matters”, why do leaders keep repeating it? It’s not because path dependence is the inevitable outcome of a poor decision — rather, it’s a symptom of our flawed instincts as problem-solvers. When we take an unscientific, heuristic approach to solutions, we’re sacrificing the optimal path in favor of the least-resistant one. Whether the path is fueled by fear, greed, or otherwise, it’s a short-term fix drummed up by the primitive impulses in our brains.

All this wouldn’t be so bad if, upon implementing a solution, we decided to measure it scientifically against longer-term impacts. Unfortunately, the same primitive instincts that originally led us to our decision are difficult to overcome by this stage. Fear of guilt, fear of loss, fear of the unknown — all of them nurture our confirmation bias to reinforce the comforting yet misguided tale that whatever decision we arrived at long ago was the right one, opportunity cost be damned. Through this lens, path dependence is the narrowing of perspectives, with self-fulfilling prophecies serving as the output.

Standing for such behavior is a dangerous position when a tsunami of smart city tech looms over city plans. It’s not just a gauntlet of potential vendor lock-in and infrastructure bloat which leaders need to navigate, but the profound risk of their natural weaknesses as decision makers. Left unaccountable, the smart city wave could simply give us Commuter Culture 2.0: a continuation of ignored impacts, veiled costs and subsidized behaviors all constructed to avoid hearing bad news about a decision we’re convinced is destiny, and therefore must be good.

That’s not a smart city. That’s a gadget city.

Truly smart cities will be recognizable by their early focus on systemic telecommuting — the antithesis of path dependence. From its official proposal fifty years ago to this very moment, distanced work has been making its case with scientific, measurable, disprovable outcomes on a foundation of flexible technology. Its only crutch is a reliance on the proliferation and advancement of mankind’s greatest modern invention, the internet. As such, it’s about as safe a bet as one can make on infrastructure.

More important than the specific bet, though, is the problem of having to wager at all; it’s the act of deciding which cripples our strength to change course down the road. Now consider the flexibility of mass telecommuting: as Coronavirus mitigation measures have shown, it’s a behavioral shift more than a third of the population can make instantaneously, which means they can go back just as quickly. The implementation cost is near zero, which means no city officials becoming hypnotized by sunk cost fallacies and no signing of regrettable vendor contracts. Nearly everything about telecommuting adoption is non-destructive, critically objective, and totally malleable. What it does destroy is either welcomed for a reduction (pollution, stress) or overdue for a reckoning (misaligned gas tax revenues, subsidized parking revenues).

When we picture our cities of tomorrow, let us not envision all the new shapes we’ll have to make excuses for. Let’s envision a city where the ability to reshape takes precedence over the shape itself.