The worst part is we already have an example that works to significantly reduce vehicle trips & miles: mandate hybird/remote work. Mandate that all jobs that can be performed remotely allow a minimum of 60% of hours to be worked remotely, and suddenly everybody that goes to the office to use a computer now has the legal right to instead stay home and do the same thing from a computer for 3 days a week, and now there are ~60% fewer vehicles in every rush hour traffic jam
That would be ideal, but my husband’s office job just fired a bunch of people for resisting the end of work from home. The company’s argument was “people aren’t getting work done.” Even though it was all getting done. Companies in general aren’t going to give up their ability to own their employees without a fight.
I guess what I’m saying is this won’t happen until the government forces the issue. IF the government forces the issue.
But you are 100% right. We saved so much on gas and car maintenance when work from home was a thing, and we started seeing a huge amount of lichens in our area that were once pretty rare during covid. Apparently that one species grows a lot more when air pollution is low.
Yeah remote work is really a benefit that’s not uniformly available and in some cases seems to be entirely limited to senior level roles.
The good news is it’s very popular with employees and can help make up for other deficiencies the company might have. For example, the place. I work at now has more employees at the main office than they have desks, so they’re able to save on expensive real estate by not expanding the building. Additionally the company I work at is located in a very small unincorporated town (basically it’s headquartered exactly where it was founded) and while it has larger cities within reasonable commuting distance, by being entirely hybrid/remote they pull talent from a much larger distance for lower level roles and from anywhere in the country for more senior roles as needed, so they’re not limited to just the local talent which tends to lack the specialization that a company of this scale would need
Are you sure decoupling (alone) has the desired effect here? Given the ‘Suburban Dream’, society might sprawl even better, because there would be less constraints then.
In my understanding, suburbia might become cultural (ie. people don’t arrange themselves with the sprawl longer, they embrace and dream of it) once a certain threshold of sprawl or its countermeasures is achieved.
The worst part is we already have an example that works to significantly reduce vehicle trips & miles: mandate hybird/remote work. Mandate that all jobs that can be performed remotely allow a minimum of 60% of hours to be worked remotely, and suddenly everybody that goes to the office to use a computer now has the legal right to instead stay home and do the same thing from a computer for 3 days a week, and now there are ~60% fewer vehicles in every rush hour traffic jam
That would be ideal, but my husband’s office job just fired a bunch of people for resisting the end of work from home. The company’s argument was “people aren’t getting work done.” Even though it was all getting done. Companies in general aren’t going to give up their ability to own their employees without a fight.
I guess what I’m saying is this won’t happen until the government forces the issue. IF the government forces the issue.
But you are 100% right. We saved so much on gas and car maintenance when work from home was a thing, and we started seeing a huge amount of lichens in our area that were once pretty rare during covid. Apparently that one species grows a lot more when air pollution is low.
Yeah remote work is really a benefit that’s not uniformly available and in some cases seems to be entirely limited to senior level roles.
The good news is it’s very popular with employees and can help make up for other deficiencies the company might have. For example, the place. I work at now has more employees at the main office than they have desks, so they’re able to save on expensive real estate by not expanding the building. Additionally the company I work at is located in a very small unincorporated town (basically it’s headquartered exactly where it was founded) and while it has larger cities within reasonable commuting distance, by being entirely hybrid/remote they pull talent from a much larger distance for lower level roles and from anywhere in the country for more senior roles as needed, so they’re not limited to just the local talent which tends to lack the specialization that a company of this scale would need
Are you sure decoupling (alone) has the desired effect here? Given the ‘Suburban Dream’, society might sprawl even better, because there would be less constraints then.
In my understanding, suburbia might become cultural (ie. people don’t arrange themselves with the sprawl longer, they embrace and dream of it) once a certain threshold of sprawl or its countermeasures is achieved.
Does it matter though if they don’t have to drive as much anymore? Isn’t it still better
Short term yes