As someone who lives in the center of a large city: no. It's not the work commute. It's everything else.
Having a coffee shop at the bottom of my lift. Having 4 super markets within walking distance. Having 200+ restaurants to pick from. Museums when I get bored, book shops, theaters, cinemas, meetups, hacker spaces the list goes on.
Having to commute for an hour would give me enough time to wake up. My previous job was 5 minutes walking from where I lived, my current one is 8. I take a detour through a park to make it 30 so I can drink a coffee before I get in.
That people are complaining that they can't afford that and making it into an issue on the same level as getting food and drink is ridiculous.
Housing prices are a systemic problem that needs to be addressed. The way to address it is by cutting demand. Build up infrastructure in rural areas so I can actually get decent internet, that bridges don't feel like they will fall down if I drive over them too quickly. Change the regulations so only livable units are built in cities. Change the requirements that non-citizens can't own more than 50% of a dwelling. There is a huge number of tweaks that could solve the housing affordability problem.
The problems with long commutes all revolve around home ownership.
People want big houses on big yards. Most can't afford that close to work, which means they make the economic choice to trade the commute time for that "dream".
That's fine but the problem is that government subsidizes that dream to a ridiculous degree. Urban sprawl has a huge cost in infrastructure, largely borne by the taxpayer.
Low-density urban sprawl largely also makes public transport uneconomic (public transport works best in high density cities and countries).
Lastly, home ownership decreases the flexibility of the labour market. People are less able and less inclined to pick up and move to find work opting instead for lower-paid employment or no employment at all.
We could make living far out in the burbs less attractive by making commuting more expensive. However, at least here in Germany, people get tax breaks for commuting. I find that weird.
I'm arguing that, within many major urban areas, wage levels in certain classes of work necessitate a commute. Read the section "A persistent spatial mismatch for American low-wage workers" in this report: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/expanding-supply-af...
I think you may have misread. The parent comment mentioned housing as an issue because people with even normal incomes are struggling to afford housing. That has nothing to do with the commute, although I totally agree that commuting for work is its own very serious proble.
They should do it the other way round: employer has to reimburse you for your commute and pay commute time as work time. Guess how quickly companies will put pressure on legislation to solve the housing problem.
I think the way to improve that is to somehow lower the cost of housing, such that workers can afford to live close enough to the office to minimize the time cost of commuting.
When I was commuting in the Bay Area, I'd walk half a mile to the local BART station (a walk I rather enjoyed), then I'd spend the next 90 minutes on a bus or train until I arrived at work. If I got to BART after 6am, I'd stand on the train for the first 60 minutes. Then I'd reverse the whole thing on the way home, although I typically got on the train early enough that I could sit the whole ride home. All of that, because that is what I could afford to do. The funny thing is, if I was paid at my hourly equivalent for all of that time spent commuting, I could afford to live closer to the office.
I don't know that I like working from home per se, but I definitely hated that I spent 1-3 hours a day, every day, traveling, when I could be doing something I wanted to do. My ability to have hobbies, or spend meaningful time with my family, is basically blunted by the fact that I can't afford to house my family close to where I work. Its better now that I'm out of the Bay Area, but it's still a problem, and will be a problem, for the foreseeable future.
One of my complaints is California's housing market and zoning makes it difficult for people to relocate close to work. And work to locate close to workers. So instead we have people wasting vast amounts of time and resources commuting.
I've probably spent 5000 hours and $100,000 on commuting over the last 30 years. It's all been fundamentally a waste.
One thing that made her life so difficult is the difficulty of getting to and from work.
It's pretty crazy that we spend nearly 15% of GDP on transportation costs. I mean sure, we can all reduce the expenses by buying a 10 year old Prius and get our travel costs down. but, a big part of the problem is that housing is always so far away from work. 500 years ago, people lived within a mile or less of their work places. now it's normal for people to live 20 miles or more away. we need to start building our cities with residential and work places closer by and hold employers accountable for where they create jobs. If you want to regulate it, then by all means regulate as follows: no job can be created unless there's an available residential place to live within 1000 feet of it. this would not only save people's lives, but also significantly reduce C02 pollution as transportation is a major source of c02.
All that is in reality is employers subsidising people's decision to live somewhere with an outrageous commute (ie generally far away from urban centres). People who chose to live in urban centres close to where they're likely to work with shorter travel times are now being effectively penalised for making a responsible decision.
Alternatively we could force employers to pay for commutes but allow them to factor that into hiring decisions. If I have to pay you as if you worked 60 hours because you have a ridiculous 2 hour each way commute I'm just going to hire someone who lives 30 minutes away instead.
What would really help is making it illegal for companies to deny remote work (except for jobs where physical presence is obviously needed). That way many people wouldn’t have to commute, and those who do could travel much faster with less cars on the roads. And we could all breathe cleaner air and suffer less global warming. That we continue to commute to office jobs is grotesque and evil.
The population density has shown that this is a use less endeavor, and post COVID this makes little sense. We should be discouraging any commute for work. The idea of funneling people from the suburbs into the city daily is an idea whose time has past. Spend the money to upgrade internet infra and start deconstructing the cities. There should be an immense tax on any commuting into a center city to massively discourage that wasteful and environmentally harmful activity
Exactly! Which is why I try to propose fixing zoning issues and allowing people to live closer to their workplaces, along with the infrastructure changes to go along with it.
And: public transit as a viable alternative. I live ~10 miles from work, but it’s just a short trip from home (by bike or tram) to the train station, which drops me within 0.2 miles of the office. And the trains run every 10-15 mins all day.
I could also walk 15 mins from home for a bus that goes to the block of my office, and has service every 10 minutes until ~midnight, but I’m lazy and prefer the train.
You maybe did it for a larger house. Or maybe for cheaper rent/mortgage.
We're not talking here about folks on minimum wage who can only afford to live 2 hours outside of the city they are working in.
The highly paid software engineers on hackernews could absolutely afford to live 5 minutes from the office, 30 minutes from the office, or 2 hours from the office.
They could afford to move to a city with good transit where they can only afford an apartment, or to a city with no transit where they can afford a giant mansion.
One could argue that in an ever so slightly better society all jobs wouldn't require commuting because you could live near where you work. Most of commuting comes down to the other side of the remote work problem, people can only find affordable housing that's so far from their jobs that it requires them to commute.
I have an idea: stop making people commute to work. Half of the folk who hop in their cars every morning to spend two hours in traffic have no business going anywhere - their line of work doesn't require them to be in any specific place.
This is a horrible idea. I have had commutes up to almost 2 hours each way, because my line of work was limited and not at all work from home able. I chose to live in a smaller town, yes. But i dont feel i should be forced to live in a big city with crazy home prices just because my job cant be in a smaller town. Im a professional, and not all professions have offices like mcdonalds have food places. I feel i pay the price enough with gas and tires and brakes.
Regarding short/long commutes, the real problem is why people are having long commutes - it's because most jobs are concentrated in small districts far away from human settlements.
It's a very old school way of thinking, exacerbated and encouraged by urban planning schemes, tax deductions if you open an office in X instead of Y etc.
It might not be easy to fix in many cases, but we must start decentralization if we want a better world. The pinnacle of centralization is France, where virtually everything important and interesting happens in a few areas of Paris, and putting stuff in Paris is the default, no-brainer decision.
Having a coffee shop at the bottom of my lift. Having 4 super markets within walking distance. Having 200+ restaurants to pick from. Museums when I get bored, book shops, theaters, cinemas, meetups, hacker spaces the list goes on.
Having to commute for an hour would give me enough time to wake up. My previous job was 5 minutes walking from where I lived, my current one is 8. I take a detour through a park to make it 30 so I can drink a coffee before I get in.
That people are complaining that they can't afford that and making it into an issue on the same level as getting food and drink is ridiculous.
Housing prices are a systemic problem that needs to be addressed. The way to address it is by cutting demand. Build up infrastructure in rural areas so I can actually get decent internet, that bridges don't feel like they will fall down if I drive over them too quickly. Change the regulations so only livable units are built in cities. Change the requirements that non-citizens can't own more than 50% of a dwelling. There is a huge number of tweaks that could solve the housing affordability problem.
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