How to keep moving by not travelling

I've been working in Portsmouth this week, on a project looking at what happens when the military decides it doesn't want its land anymore. A few years ago it was relatively easy: developers' eyes would light up, and to a background of imaginary cash tills they'd draw up plans for penthouse flats and swanky stores.

It's going to get harder. The Ministry of Defence has hundreds of sites it wants to get rid of, and there won't be a quick buck for the public purse while land values are low, and builders can work on alternative sites that haven't been contaminated by military uses and are easily accessible.

If there's one thing military sites lack, it's easy access. They've been behind high walls and barbed wire for decades, sometimes centuries. For strategic reasons they were built on the edge, and centres of population grew up around them. But without the navy, would you build a city where Portsmouth is?

Portsmouth is hugely dependent on its naval base - one recent study suggested 35,000 jobs hung on its retention. But Portsmouth has managed to diversify, not least through its university, which now rivals the navy as a source of revenue.

In nearby Gosport it's not such a happy story. The town has little to offer except housing land, military operations and water (much of it still restricted). Lying on a peninsula, it's a bottleneck. Try selling that as a location to businesses and developers when times are tough.

There was a plan to change all that - a light rail system linking Fareham, Gosport and Portsmouth, with a tunnel under Portsmouth harbour and 16 stations. It could have made South Hampshire work, just as the Tube makes London work, linking homes, businesses, leisure and educational facilities. And with so many miles of waterfront, it could offer an exceptional quality of life. The government refused to finance it, arguing it was too expensive.

This is a familiar story: governments, time and again, refuse to back the kind of transport infrastructure that could keep cities moving, and the cities themselves are often unable to take the risk (unlike many of their counterparts in Europe and the United States, which have far greater revenue-raising powers).

So what do we do? In the absence of investment, we need to find other ways of oiling the wheels - or of reducing the need for wheels in the first place. Perhaps it's time to think laterally.

Compared with railways, internet communications are relatively cheap. They don't get us from A to B, but they can often bring B to A. And when that happens, the need for travel can be eliminated - easing the pressure on existing infrastructure and making walking and cycling simpler and more pleasurable. (Interestingly, in two days in Portsmouth, a city that's virtually flat, I saw hardly anyone using a bike).

There are two ways we can do this, both of which chime with many people's aspirations. We can localise work, and we can localise education.

Localising work isn't possible in every industry, but there are huge steps we can take, cutting the need for energy-intensive office buildings and wasted time commuting. Most office workers could do their jobs as easily at home much of the time, or in small managed workspaces near their homes. The idea that you need to be physically present and supervised all the time to work effectively is a relic of the 1950s and William Whyte's Organization Man.

Many businesses have already understood this and offer flexible working arrangements, understanding that what matters is the quality of a person's work and not their appearance in an office or ability to wear a suit. But it's still far from the norm. Enlightened companies should dump the commuter culture and offer their staff incentives not to come into the office; and enlightened cities should offer sweeteners to companies that localise and network their workforce, instead of priding themselves on securing prestigious tenants for those empty city centre offices. That will free up town centres for uses that attract people who are there because they want to be, not because they have to be.

As for work, so for education. The problem with most schools is not who runs them - state or otherwise - but their size. Smaller schools may lack the specialist facilities some mega-schools offer, but they're better for children's wellbeing. The idea that a child benefits from commuting to school on a crowded bus, jostling their peers in crowded corridors, or trying to concentrate in crowded classrooms, is frankly bizarre.

The concentration of education has spawned a host of ills, not least of which is the school run, a carbon-belching lemming-rush that grinds cities and suburbs to a halt ten times a week. It accentuates social division, dividing cities into rich or poor on the basis of catchment areas that in turn influence house prices. Schools, good or bad, become poles of a magnet, attracting or repelling. Look at the traffic flows across any English city at 8.30am on a weekday and you'll see kids being ferried out of poorer neighbourhoods wherever their parents can wangle it, leaving more local schools for the poorest children and - often - the poorest teachers.

Localising education won't solve every problem, but it will help. Smaller schools are easier to manage and less frightening; having them closer to home will cut out the school run; and having more schools can remove the Hobson's choice so many parents face between the 'good' and the local. It then becomes easier, too, to target special support to schools in the most difficult areas.

But why stop there? In remote parts of Canada or Scandinavia, it's normal practice for children to learn online from their homes. Why drag them to school at all much of the time? We could cut the school week by half and arrange distance learning the rest of the time without any loss of educational attainment - indeed, we might improve it.

People will argue, of course, that children will be running riot on the streets or be left at home on their own, watching TV or taking drugs. Some might. But they're also, by and large, the children who will struggle most or be most disruptive at school. We need to stop thinking of schools as a kind of prison system to keep as many children shut up for as long as possible, and start to imagine how children's lives could improve by doing education differently. Maybe - and I'll probably be burned as a heretic for this one - we could even allow them a little more sleep.

Imagine a city where most parents work and most children learn within walking distance of their homes. Imagine the quality of life gained by uncongested streets. Think how much more intelligent it would be if parents or carers could take an hour out of their working day to sort out a family crisis and then make up the time later, rather than having to take a day off or stay at work and ring round trying to find a neighbour to help. It would help to build the social capital within families, rather than relying on the educational system to provide a substitute for it.

Imagine city planners putting their energy into cycle schemes rather than road widening projects, because people can get around without risking life and limb every time they mount their bikes. Imagine fast, frequent bus services between neighbourhoods because the streets aren't clogged with parents who daren't leave their kids to the mercies of public transport.

Impossible? Only as impossible as imagination.