The authors missed some important causes about why commuters prefer to drive personal vehicles. If they were going straight from home to work and back again then carpooling or public transit would often be fine. But real workers often need to make extra stops at schools, child care, stores, gyms, club meetings, etc. Making driving harder and more expensive for those workers only serves to punish them without offering any practical alternatives.
>Make the full cost of driving salient for employees
The problem that I usually see when someone brings up this idea is that the employee's "cost" is ignored. I used to live in the Washington, D.C. area, where I could walk or take the bus to the subway. One way, the total time was 30 minutes longer than driving. Between the cost of the subway and my time, it was cheaper to drive.
For 18 years, I commuted year-round by bike, rather than drive. It took as long as the bus-subway combination from my last apartment. While it took more time, I did not have to pay for gas and my maintenance costs were minimal.
Oddly, the article seemed to overlook the most obvious elements of why it’s hard to shift that behavior:
Driving around picking people up consumes precious morning time. In exchange, one sacrifices their bespoke commuting routine.
That is, instead of getting to work in 40 minutes of listening to RPG podcasts with the window open in winter, I get there in an hour and fifteen while engaging in small talk and compromising on climate control.
People don’t just forego carpooling because the costs Of driving are externalized; they forego carpooling because carpooling carries significant personal costs.
Is there a reason these analysts couldn’t bother to include the element of “people don’t carpool because it sucks”?
Making driving harder and more expensive for those workers only serves to punish them without offering any practical alternatives.
There's nothing wrong with this, with the understanding that drivers' daily commutes are already subsidized and the article talks about making this salient to commuters. I wouldn't describe taking away a subsidy as a punishment or penalty, though. Also, the article talks about the possibility of giving alternative commuters the carrot rather than lone drivers the stick anyway.
They also revolve around people who fail to understand trade-offs and opportunity costs. This never became clearer to me than after I read "The Soul of a Commuter" in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_... . I actually just submitted it to HN as a regular article; it seems germane to this discussion, and as far as I can tell no one else has offered a point.
Most interesting to me: the long discussion of the research showing the negative effects of commuting.
Many of the people I work with own cars but will choose to cycle, walk, or take the bus (researchers who have money and are well educated). Just because they drive frequently, doesn't mean they are doing it to commute to work. They probably don't benefit much from more parking spaces.
This is truly amazingly poor reasoning rhetoric. Your entire argument is two straw men.
Fallacy 1: I can work from home; I can't see a movie on the big screen or visit a park from home. Your analogy has improper premises.
Fallacy 2: Many offices, work locations, and entire cities are not walkable and have poor transit. This is your first straw man argument.
Fallacy 3: The activities you listed are presumed to be more enjoyable than driving into work, so the cost benefit risk profile for traveling to them is different.
Fallacy 4: Most driving to work is done simultaneously with others aka in much heavier traffic, significantly increasing the risk of commuting vs other driving.
Fallacy 5: Work driving will occur much more frequently and over typically much longer periods of time than the events you listed. As your risk of accidents rise proportionally to time on the road, these again are not equally weighted.
In short: nobody with a driving-only commute who does not want to RTO is also saying they don't want to go to parks or restaurants or travel. This is your second straw man.
> makes you mostly sit in traffic while going to work
Cherry picking this part of your argument: the last time I switched jobs this is what I told myself to rationalize commuting 50 mins one way (plus 15 mins last mile stuff). It works out _terribly_ if the mode of transport is not super reliable.
I can drive to work in twelve minutes. If I humor the premise of a bus that stops in front of my home and also my workplace, which is unlikely to ever exist no matter how much money is thrown at public transit, it would still take several times longer than driving myself because there are numerous other homes and businesses between which the bus would stop at.
Using a bus would mean I have to wake up earlier, and therefore fall asleep earlier, and also get back later. It would mean less time at home with my family. I suppose next you'll say that I should be living in walking distance of my job, like my life and indeed entire communities should be structured around employers like during the industrial revolution. God forbid you ever want to change your job, you'll have to hope the new one is next door or you'll be moving your family... more likely you're locked into your current job which is just the way employers would like it. The normalization of cars were a huge win for labor, but the anti-car crowd always ignores this. I guess being locked into my job and at the mercy of public transit is meant to be compensated by the benevolence of The Party who will surely have my back? No thanks.
Assuming you're driving yourself, this is universally a productivity killer. You risking a huge amount of frustrating and angering situations while your workers are commuting to a central location. I'd put good money on a lot of lost productivity to commute.
Then there's the people who have to commute, due to functionally in-person jobs (artisans, doctors, baristas, etc.). Optional commuters going to the office for their "social fix" are doing so at the expense of forced commuters. Work should be work and social should be social; if you want a social experience during work hours then have a social lunch in your neighborhood.
I used to live a 10 minute drive from work, and I never took the bus because it would take close to an hour.
Now I live a 10 minute nonstop bus drive from work, but the fare is the same, which means it's several times the cost of gas for my vehicle even at 16 mpg. And it still takes about 15-30 minutes by bus, net, because of the time waiting for it.
I can walk home after work before the bus even arrives, but the only way to get there is across 3 highways with no crosswalks and people going 50+ mph.
I'm not happy with any of my choices, but driving my gas guzzler kind of seems rational after I've tried all the options and weighed them.
For the moment, it may make sense to not use my car because if I don't commute in it, I'm less likely to go somewhere after work, but that's more of a psychological trick than a logical consequence.
...and while I'm not in a mega-city, I'm in the middle of a medium to smallish city that's part of an area with a million people or so.
I take it you didn't bother to read the words commute and job, which implies travel to a workplace to conduct work. While you can combine a commute with a trip to buy groceries, if it happens to be on the way, and drop off/pick up kids at school, if it is on the way and the schedule works out that way, for most that's simply not reality. Note that my post said nothing about giving up one's vehicles, it only mentioned commuting trips for work. Don't add things to comments that aren't there.
This might change, but only if normal traffic gets worse.
* Loss of freedom
I have the option of visiting friends/family in other locations if I drive.
Loss of freedom is also related to the very poor intra-networking; the entire transit system in the area is designed as a star pattern for getting workers to the city.
* Commuting in a carpool is hard when you aren't a shift worker: your hours and those of other workers aren't the same, you might not even have multiple workers from the same area at a small company.
* Commuting in a carpool is hard when you aren't a full time worker: (I don't have this problem, but friends do) if your hours aren't consistent or you might be called in at a moment's notice.
I think the answer to all of this is flexible pooled transit. Probably an extension of what we know of today as taxi/ubur; but much more Johnny Cab (80's Total Recall).
Driving to work is not a choice for a lot of people particularly lower class. Our cities our built around cars. As people move out of the city to save money, that makes driving even more necessary and makes public transit less of a viable option. This program relies on a very naive belief that people can control their amount of driving, but we don't control sprawl at an individual level, we don't control infrastructure. Who is this going to benefit but the bougie Tesla owners who work remotely anyway?
Flip that; commuting to work was never a luxury. It was an unseen excess, a cost to your personal time, a cost to your employer for facilities. Having a personal vehicle is a luxury, but being forced to use it is a cost to all parties.
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.
> Let's explore the commute to work, some 60km away...
Well. There's your problem.
The idea of travelling 60km to work is a very modern phenomenon. Like a lot of people you've built your life around car travel. It's hard to get back from that.
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