Isn’t a small piece of you missing the commute?
I can see only the first two paragraphs but that’s plenty. Iain Gately in The Sunday Times:
It’s been nearly six months since we were first asked to work from home, and one of the early silver linings of lockdown was — I think we can all agree — not having to spend a large proportion of every morning and evening with our nose pressed into a stranger’s armpit on a packed train or bus.
But, with a half a year to reflect, did we wish our commutes away too readily? If you’re not back at your desk, isn’t a small piece of you missing that daily ride to and from the office? For many of us, the commute is part of who we are — and it serves a useful purpose.
Oh yes, I’m sure millions of people are missing the privilege of squandering a huge amount of money and an even huger amount of time to get from where they live to where they work. I’m sure they miss the expense and tedium and discomfort and waste. Who wouldn’t rather be sitting in a crowded train or a boring car going from X to Y than taking a walk or playing with the kids or slicing up some veggies from the garden?
It’s remarkable that the press always has money to pay for such idiotic navel-gazing but never enough to pay for competent reporting.
One of the things I don’t miss about going to work is the commute. Also the constant negative messages I receive. And the boring meetings (these are still held, but many fewer, and they are easier to deal with if I can work on important things when they are droning on about irrelevant trivia). Really, all I miss about work is walking around a beautifully landscaped canvas, having face-to-face time with my students instead of seeing their name on a computer screen since they have all been told by the school to keep their cameras off (if we had decent bandwidth, we might be able to see faces), and being able to take my students on real field trips instead of virtual ones.
No, a small part of me isn’t missing the commute, as I’m still commuting.
My commute was very short – 30-35 minutes walking, 20-25 minutes cycling, or 15 minutes by tram. I don’t miss it, but it was daily exercise and made a break between work and home. I got into a bad habit (now broken) of having a drink at 5pm to mark the break instead.
However that’s not typical. A friend of mine who works in London had a 3-4 hour commute, which cost her £££, and really meant she had no life after work during the week. London commutes are horrific.
Commuting is a fairly odd, modern phenomenon, only possible with fast transport, which has screwed up our cities in many ways. I do wonder whether the city centre, where I used to work, will become more residential, as more and more people working from home.
The commute should be relegated to the past. We need more people working from home, not fewer. Of course, all of the below is hypothetical and simplistic, but it wouldn’t seem wildly implausible if it happened in a sci-fi novel.
1. The more people work at home, the less need there is for people live near their place of employment.
2. This means there is less pressure to live in large cities.
3. So people can live in more of the country, reducing overpopulation as people move from cities to towns.
4. So property values in cities decreases with demand and property value elsewhere increases with demand, alleviating housing costs for those who cannot move for whatever reason.
5. With more people in towns, businesses have incentive to follow, thereby reinvigorating smaller communities.
6. Living and working from home in a smaller community, people have greater opportunity and ability to know their neighbors, ameliorating the loneliness epidemic.
7. With people moving from mostly blue areas to red ones, geographic political polarization is lessened.
8. With lessened geographic polarization, people are less likely to live within ideological bubbles, and politicians are incentivized to campaign to the nation rather than to the electoral map.
NiV
#3 Hell fucking no, that just moves more people and more cars to the country. Even with 0 commute miles you need to buy food, visit doctors, etc and none of that is in the country. It definitely does not reduce the population.
#4 Dream on
#5 Hell fucking no, that just means more cars needed more often and now for city people who didn’t used to require a car. Plus cities would have to subsidize infrastructure to the super inefficient country communities. I like small towns, they should just stay that way.
#7&8 Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
As for commuting I agree that needs to die in a fire. I had an hour-long one for 11 years meaning roughly 5500 hours of my life, nearly 230 days of unhealthy sitting on my ass.
It would reduce the population of cities With respect to the concern of potentially insufficient access to necessary goods and services, see #5.
Why do you believe housing prices are invariant with demand?
Inefficiencies only last as long as necessary for providers of goods and services (i.e., businesses) to follow residential population. Increased residential population leads to increased economic opportunity for business to service that population.
This is how cities grow in the first place. The process works in both directions, so it’s also how cities shrink.
The economics of providing access to goods and services is a function of population size. Towns used to have grocers and doctors and everything, but as nearby employment dissipated, people moved away. As population dissipated, it was less economically tenable for multiple grocers or doctors to remain.
Your scintillating logic astounds me.
My 2 cents on the above discussion.
I live in the countryside. My ‘normal’ commute is almost 40 miles one way. With remote working, I’m averaging less than 10 miles a WEEK. I haven’t stepped inside of a grocery store since this started. I have a little garden, the chickens provide eggs and I’ve been to the farmer’s market twice. The milkman delivers a small selection of groceries and everything else is available online (there are some competitors to Amazon, but not as many as I’d like). I hit the feed store about once a month. I buy my meat locally.
On the other hand, I’m not sure what the rest of the yahoos are doing out here, because there sure does seem to be more traffic than there ought to be on the roads.
I do hate working from home, though my commute was always small. Not sure why, but I do miss seeing at least some of my colleagues and video calls are not the same and I cannot stand them. Also, there are too many distractions at home. I just prefer the routine of going somewhere else. You’d think, as an introvert, I’d be in heaven right now, but no, I hate it. And I just don’t move as much now, with no walk from my car to my office ( which admittedly kind of sucks in bad weather). Maybe it’s just “normal” that I miss as much as anything else.
A little over three and a half years ago I was laid off from my previous job and almost immediately hired by our partners, with the understanding that I would work remotely, rather than relocating to Madison. And just about everything about that has been great, but most especially not spending two hours a day (on a good day) going to and from the office, either via the increasingly unreliable Metro or through the congestion of the metro area.
High five!
Yes I got, I’m saying this is a bad trend environmentally. My “Dream on” comment was poorly stated, withdrawn,
Small towns had stores before WalMart and other large chains, as long as they exist small town shops will remain rare unfortunately.
I wasn’t applying any logic, I was laughing because I thought they were funny things to predict. Sure they follow a logical conclusion but so what? Logically Trump shouldn’t be the POTUS but here we are.
Finally my originally reply forgot to say that I agreed with the rest of your comment.
Regarding commuting, on a few occasions I have been unfortunate enough to have been on the London underground during peak hours and it is a nightmare. Chronically over-crowded with people so desperate to avoid eye-contact that one could easily believe that the underground is plagued by Gorgons. Any attempt to make conversation is invariably met with a determined silence and very often with people turning their backs or squeezing through the throng to put as much distance between themselves and the mad Northerner* trying to break the London social conventions.
At every stop, a ruthless, every-man-for-himself two-way stampede with absolutely no consideration for anybody in the way, and on the evening commute especially the air is permeated with the stench of hot feet and damp armpits.
I decided years ago to avoid riding that particular version of Hell ever again. To steal from a routine on air travel by the Scottish comedian, Frankie Boyle: there is nowhere that I am so desperate to be that I am prepared to be taken there in a congested tube full of other people’s farts.
*Technically I’m a Midlander, but to Londoners anything above the Watford Gap is the Northern wastelands, populated by a mutant species that will, given half a chance, speak to and even – gasp! – smile at complete strangers. Oh, the horrors!
Gonna have to ring in with Mike here; as an environmental scientist with a long history of studying this issue, I can say that I hate the back to nature movement. It could work if we had a fraction of the people we have, but I live in a small city in a rural area. The population density of my state is tiny. And the rural people drive more than city people do…by orders of magnitude. Nothing much is in walking distance, and when it is, rural people will not walk. My students drive from one class to another, and nothing on our campus is more than 1/4 mile away from everything else. They will drive to a building across the street.
As for shopping? Our city no longer has any department stores (unless you count WalMart). Our last remaining local grocery just sold to a regional chain that is at least based in the state, but is not local. Five grocery stores have failed since I moved here 14 years ago. This consolidation leaves us with only one alternative to WalMart. People in the surrounding towns have none in many towns, so they must drive here for their shopping; everything is at least 30 minutes away, including the next city, about twice our size, which still has some shopping. We have been forced to drive further for shopping other than groceries.
Small towns and rural areas also have literally no mass transit. I think there are cabs around here, but I never see them. I suppose if I needed one, I could call and get one, but they are rare on the streets. There is one mass transit, which is a bus for the elderly and disabled. You cannot get anywhere by train, and no one here will walk more than 5 feet. I am thought of as peculiar because I deliberately chose a house within walking distance of two grocery stores (one of which has now sold to the other one; I consider myself lucky the closer one is the one that is the buyer). I live within walking distance of the bank, the pharmacy, the library, and my doctor, not to mention about thirty churches (the one thing that never goes out of business around here). I could even walk myself to the funeral home after I die as it is only two blocks away, except I don’t think I will be going there under my own power at that point.
Moving more people to rural areas is, quite simply, unsustainable. Also, it would do one of three things (probably all): (1) Eat up agricultural land, meaning less production and higher food prices; (2) move people onto marginal land that is fragile and unstable, leading to more disasters and destroying the land; and/or (3) chewing up what little natural habitat is left for the wildlife.
Cities are the best way to maintain enormous human populations; we just need to find a way to make cities more environmentally friendly, more human friendly, and less disease friendly. I don’t think that is undoable, but we lack the will.