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.
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.
I'll admit that I kind of like being in the office. However, I absolutely loathe commuting. There's honestly not a good solution. The best solutions are all overly optimistic. The ideal would be that all the employees lived 5-10 minutes away.
Why are we still commuting at all? The vast VAST majority of jobs can be done from home yet there is some sort of idea in management circles that if you're not in a cubicle you're not getting work done.
Think of how much better everyone's lives would be if only those who absolutely needed to be in an office (Doctors, mechanics, etc) went to work and everyone else just stayed home.
I don't want my commute distance to limit my employment opportunities.
I can't envision a day where I personally would be capable of lugging my day's supplies on a bike 20+ miles (each way!), nor where it's practical to take public transit. Nor do I want to only be limited to working in areas my local public transit serves.
This ideal you have just isn't realistic for an awful lot of people. Especially those not living in the large metropolitan areas.
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.
Has anyone studied if people outside of cushy tech jobs want to commute? particularly people with lower wages and things at home they would rather escape for 9 hours a day. Most people can't afford a home office too.
One of the most annoying arguments against working from the office is that you have to have a terrible commute. Yes, if you have a 1 hour long commute working from the office will be miserable. But the problem is not working from a a workplace, it’s the Wall-E esque culture we’ve created for ourselves.
American cities are made for cars, which stretch cities out and transform our entire lives. The Cupertino campus had an insane parking minimum that even Apple failed to fight against. (Or maybe they decided not to).
It’s annoying that we blame everyone but ourselves on issues like long commutes, gas prices, obesity, pedestrian deaths, pollution, loneliness, etc. You can’t have an affordable 3000sq ft. home without some sacrifice. Ideally people with larger homes just hop on a commuter train but 90% of American simply don’t want that.
Instead, we are happy to blame these problems on transplants, construction projects, Joe Biden, and evil corporations who ask us to… gasp come to work. Never ourselves.
I of course say this from a position of privilege because if I were to have a job with a commute (which I dearly miss having tbh) I could probably afford to live within walking distance to the office. But I’m not telling people to “just move closer” I’m just asking for trains.
Anyways - that was a rant, but I think this is one of the most important issues in American society today.
I'm all for spreading the workforce out and encouraging more remote work. It makes no sense to subject so many people to LA, SF, and NYC commutes every day when the job can be done just as well from home or another office location in a suburb or satellite campus somewhere.
* Employers should pay the cost of employee travel to work, at least count the time spent traveling to work as work hours. If I'm driving into work it's not really my free time.
* If I lived near my workplace, I wouldn't care about working from home so much. Society has done something seriously wrong where most people cannot live near where they work.
* By getting the professional class off the roads, traffic is better for those who have to work in person. By tearing down the offices that aren't really needed and replacing with residential and other mixed use, we might have a shot at rearranging things where the people that need to be physically present at work can live close to work.
Telecommuting is no solution. People travel to work because it has economic and social benefits. Not everyone wants to provide office space at home.
I am in favor of telecommuting if it is offered to make life better for the employee or to improve the employer's profitability. However, I often see it advanced as a transportation policy. On that front, it fails because its objective is to reduce the amount of transportation that occurs. Since the beginning of time, humans have embraced transportation because it improves their quality of life. Any policy that seeks to reduce the amount of transportation that occurs is literally retrograde and reactionary.
It seems like there are ways to solve the commuting problem, by moving closer to work for example, in much the same way as you say others should find a job to satisfy their in-person work requirements. But opinions aside, what is true is that remote work is not common in the vast majority of workplaces around the world - and isn't a viable option for a number of of jobs. Saying "People work differently" doesn't change that reality.
Yes, commuting is the number one reason to work from home for me. I don't like to spend 1-2 hours a day driving back and forth just to have my ass in a chair at the office.
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.
This seems like the most logical solution. I think the issue is that the people who are impacted the most by these long commutes are workers who can't physically work remotely. The people who work for companies that could implement it, generally live close enough that the commute doesn't bother them in the first place.
I don't doubt that there are good reasons to work from a central location - I do a lot of pre-sales work so I understand the importance of face to face - however, if I weigh up the cost of commuting (as a whole for society) then we just cannot justify having all office workers commuting 5 days per week.
We can still make face to face work, I just don't believe everybody has to commute everyday - it's all about balance - we just need a culture shift.
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