Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, November 9, 1993                   TAG: 9311110484
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TELEJOBS

Among federal Clean Air Act amendments is a requirement, adopted in 1991, for certain areas that exceed pollution standards to reduce automobile traffic. They are to do this by giving employers with more than 100 workers at one workplace a mandate to increase workers' vehicle occupancy by 25 percent above whatever the average occupancy is for the area.

This sounds like a difficult average to determine and a nightmare to enforce, but keep looking. There may be a silver lining peeking through.

The federal legislation considers telecommuters among a company's employees who are reporting to work. Telecommuters, who work at home or at community-based work centers, "commute" to their home offices over the telephone line, which links workers' computers with the company's.

Those workers aren't driving their cars into the city, thus are polluting the air less. And the fact that they are counted when an employer calculates its average vehicle-occupancy helps businesses comply with the mandate - and gives them an incentive to hire telecommuters. In fact, the state of Washington is so eager to discourage commuting and encourage telecommuting that it has passed a law to count telecommuters as more than one rider.

The benefits of telecommuting extend, moreover, beyond congested metropolises, beyond pollution-reduction, to places like Western Virginia. In much of this part of the state, there are places where people want to live but where they cannot find work. The narrow, winding roads typical of the mountainous terrain and the distances from major markets discourage businesses from locating there.

So people are forced either to move where the jobs are, or commute long distances. Either way adds to traffic congestion and air pollution. Bringing the jobs to the people, over the phone line, is a nice alternative.