7 ms·

We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees. I'd personally be in favor of a "congestion tax" or somesuch for companies

We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees. I'd personally be in favor of a "congestion tax" or somesuch for companies that force their employees to come in rather than work remotely. Commuting takes up energy and resources, and the congestion incurs costs on third parties (car accidents, higher gas prices, and the like). While it's debatable whether remote works for businesses that can work remotely, it imposes costs on the rest of us, especially those who can't do their jobs over an Internet connection, and those costs should be paid by those who willingly incur them, not whoever they can push them off to.

imgabe 9y ago
I've thought about this in the past. What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work. On the other hand, employees would have an incentive to try to stretch out their commute as much as possible, to get extra pay for time "not working". I don't know how rampant that would be. I like to think most people hate commuting enough that it wouldn't be worth it to make an extra $20 sitting in traffic when you could just be home faster, but who knows.
- mrleinad 9y ago
  If the money goes to the government, then you don't have that problem.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  In the end, setting aside the distortions caused by minimum wage laws, companies pay for the value they receive from their employees. How you want to apportion that value (hours, widgets, hours [including commuting hours], flexible work arrangements, paid time off, company holidays, etc) doesn't matter much. As an employer, I'm indifferent between paying someone $50/hour for an 8-hour work day, or $40/hr for an 8-hour workday plus 2 hours of paid commuting.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    But you would also be incentivized to locate your office in a more commutable location. In some cases, a slightly higher rent would even make sense to offset the costs of paying people to commute.
    - sokoloff 9y ago
      Maybe. (In fact, we already care quite a bit about commuting time and ease because we want to retain our developers in a very competitive employment market.) I think it's more likely that the interview process would just have another step to suss out how much commuting time I'd be paying you for, and then figuring out how to divide up your day rate of $400 (higher in reality, of course) across the buckets. So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day.
      - humanrebar 9y ago
        > So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day. You'd have to be careful about that. Employers might end up, in data, showing a negative impact against some protected class (married people, certain races) if they weigh hiring or compensation decisions based on proximity to the office. It's my understanding that current jurisprudence doesn't require proof of intention to discriminate, just evidence of disparate impact. Single and married people live in different neighborhoods. Different races do as well, depending on the city. Non-heterosexual people tend to cluster in certain neighborhoods, too, for that matter. If a class action suit can show that married people are paid 10% less than single people for equivalent roles, it could be problematic.
        sokoloff 9y ago
        Which is all the more reason to make the job the job and the responsibility of getting to the job not [a paid part of] the job.
  - computerphage 9y ago
- leereeves 9y ago
  Interesting idea. Regarding the second point: Employees always have an incentive to try to stretch out their tasks, so employers already know how to minimize that behavior. If employers paid for commuting, commuting would be managed like other tasks.
- maxsilver 9y ago
  > What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work. I don't know. I worry that would immediately become a major form of discrimination -- it would inherently put anyone who was poor/middle-class or anyone with any sort of family/children at a huge employment disadvantage. Large companies would only ever hire already-hyper-wealthy individuals for their main positions (since they are the only people who are ever allowed to live in dense urban places). I'm imagining employers in Seattle saying "We like this guy, but he doesn't live in Pioneer Square where our office is, so that will be a pain, we should pass on him" Many people already have to deal with that discrimination somewhat in terms of employers only being in major cities. Having that hyper-charged down to just major cities wealthiest neighborhoods seems like an even worse situation.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Yea as someone who has a 2+ hour commute each way, such a policy would doom me to unemployment unless I was willing to take a huge loan and live closer to where the employers are. Good intentions, but bad idea.
  - asteli 9y ago
    I don't think we should take it for granted that it's prohibitively expensive to live in cities. That may be the state of metro areas in North America right now (SF, NYC, Vancouver) but historically this isn't a constant. Obviously enough economic incentive exists to convince people to spend the time and effort to commute, but if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included.
    - maxsilver 9y ago
      > if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included. I agree, and would personally do the same too if possible. But I've watched us artificially inflate property values for literally my entire life. Even in my tiny US Midwest city in the middle of nowhere, city center prices have never been remotely affordable. We should take it for granted that it's too expensive to live in US/CA/AUS/NZ cities -- because that's the honest truth. That's been the current state for decades, and there's very little chance that any major city center ever becomes affordable again in our lifetimes. Obviously, we should still try to fix this. I fully support trying. But every facet of our society is wholly dedicated to preventing city centers from ever becoming affordable. Affordable city centers just are not likely to happen. We should not assume regular people live in a situation that doesn't exist, and likely never will.
- beojan 9y ago
  What if commuting expenses were paid for, but the time spent commuting wasn't?
- briffle 9y ago
  Or at least encourage you to 'start at 10am' and other times, so that 7:30am-9am is not a single solid rush hour.. Spread the traffic over 3-4 hours, and its much nicer for everyone..
  - philsnow 9y ago
    In the bay area the morning crush is anywhere between 6:45 and 11:45. I've sometimes tried the "man traffic looks really bad right now and I don't have any meetings in the morning, I'll wait until later to start my commute" and then check again at 10:30 and it's the same _or worse_.
    - tene 9y ago
      I don't have any particular evidence that this is actually true, instead of just noticing patterns in randomness, but something that feels like it works more often than chance is commuting right after 09:00 or 10:00, on the theory that a significant number of commuters have deadlines on the hour, so traffic might be less immediately after the deadline. It's not completely reliable, so I'm skeptical that it's real, but it also makes a good enough excuse to get me on the road earlier than I would otherwise, so that's nice.
  - burntsushi 9y ago
    That's what I do. I commute to Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA. I get into the office at 6:30AM every day and leave by 2:30PM. It's still not a lovely commute---maybe 40 to 50 minutes each way---but it's half the time if I were forced to work 9-5. I pay for this with sleep. It's hard for me to get to sleep before 10PM. :-)
    - gozur88 9y ago
      I tried that one job. Invariably managers would schedule meetings at 3:00, or someone would come to my desk at 2:15 with a task that just had to be finished that day.
      - 9y ago
- bluGill 9y ago
  In addition to the other negatives, there is also personal life considerations. Most people have a significant other who they want to live with long term, who also works. This throws a bunch of complications into the picture that I can't quite figure out.
- rayvd 9y ago
  I'm not following. Companies do pay for this. Via salary...
  - FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
    ? Hourly workers who live further away dont get paid more.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      In effect they do, because nobody would commute if there were a job that paid as much closer to home.
      - wolco 9y ago
        It is not true or everyone's pay would go up or down if they moved locations.
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        I don't really think you can say that. Labor is not a perfect market.
        gozur88 9y ago
        It's close enough over large groups of people. On average you're going to make more money doing the same thing in SF, for example, than you would in the East Bay.
        s73ver_ 9y ago
        I wouldn't be comfortable agreeing to that statement.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  It's a good idea in principle, but... Also, you have to remember, in places like the bay area, you can't just pick up and move closer to work. People have enormous incentives to never move: Proposition 13 means you get 5 times lower property taxes by staying put. Not to mention the enormous imbalance between housing and jobs. All the jobs are on the peninnsula and all the housing is in the east bay. All these problems would just be amplified. I think we're miss-stating the problem. The problem isn't that employers are forcing us to commute long distances with poor company placement. The problem is, we as employees don't have enough power to choose/demand where we want to work. There's simply too much labor supply and too little demand. So, if a worker demands to work remotely, the company can just say: we'll fire this guy and hire one of the countless others willing to commute 2 hours or more. Just to prove my point: Here in the bay area, companies still place themselves on the penninsula where there's a 4 to 1 ratio of jobs to residential places to live. By that math, they shouldn't be able to hire anyone. And yet, they're having absolutely no problem filling positions, because workers are extremely desperate for money. So desperate, they're willing commute 2 hours or pay 60% of their paycheck to live closer. These are all symptoms of labor oversupply and too little labor demand.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    And yet, we keep hearing about a shortage of developers.
- mac01021 9y ago
  > What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They already do. I'll take a lower salary from a company that doesn't make me commute.
briandear 9y ago
Who ultimately pays for this congestion tax? The employees in the form of lower salaries, the customers in the form of higher prices and the shareholders in the form of lower profits. I prefer an alternative approach: a telecommuting incentive tax credit. Telecommuters themselves get a tax credit and companies also get a tax credit. That would be the fastest way to spur more remote friendly workplaces. Then the environment, congestion, commute stress, etc will all be reduced. The "cost" of the credit would be more than offset by reduced road maintenance costs, lower pollution, fewer accidents, etc. Unless you're dealing with customers directly, or making a physical product, there's no reason that offices in their conventional form should exist.
- ashark 9y ago
  You... prefer the version that makes everyone pay for telecommuters, rather than making only those who directly interact with non-telecommuter companies pay, and which is more open to being gamed/scammed? Why?
- timthelion 9y ago
  Tax credits are, IMO, a bad thing for normal people. Most people do not know have the know-how to take advantage of them.
- drchickensalad 9y ago
  So then what about the government revenue loss from tax credits?
- wpietri 9y ago
  Everybody's already paying the congestion tax. They just pay in time, health, and lost productivity. But since it's a negative externality, the incentive to fix it is blunted. If a congestion tax worked, the overall burden would go down, because businesses would work harder to locate offices near where employees are (or want to be). And they'd also likely get more active in things like housing and transit policy, because it would be to their direct financial benefit to make sure that development was more balanced.
ataturk 9y ago
Something has to happen--my commute is only 11 miles but it often takes 40 minutes because of a stupid bridge that has had every social engineering plot applied to it to no avail (HOV lanes with pay-to-use transponders being the latest fashion and cops to enforce the rules slowing everyone else down). My career has suffered because I have never wanted the stress of a long commute nor could I afford the real estate prices and city problems involved with being closer in. It's a bunch of diminishing returns every direction I look, so my solution was to just find work that was less desirable but at least manageable in the context of my whole life situation. I contend that people who don't do that eventually suffer mental breakdowns, but have no evidence to back up that claim other than conjecture. As it stands, my current commute is still bad, but I bet it's only 10% as bad as the hell most people around here go through. I've decided that working for a living is just generally bad for health, but a necessary evil, of course. I probably sound like a whiner, but I am truly interested in the commuting problem because I work for a company that heavily promotes cycling to work and ride sharing. Unfortunately, the infrastructure between my home and my work location precludes safe cycling along much of the route so I don't do it, but a lot of employees do. Instead, I stupidly get up at 5:45am, get out the door by 6:30am or so, creep along on a stupid, dark bridge with lots of other stupid people, then arrive to work around 7am or so, depending on the breaks. At least the drive home isn't as bad as long as I'm on the road by 3:15pm or so. I do get the occasional work from home day, but our team is highly collaborative, so I'm at a disadvantage if I'm not at the office. In previous roles I had more autonomy and could thus make a better go of remote work. I worry that 100% remote roles make you a non-entity in your organization and thus dispensable.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  Not being effective enough is what puts you at risk of being dispensable. Being remote might contribute to, or increase the risk of, not being effective, but it's not the most proximate cause.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  >a stupid bridge that has had every social engineering plot applied to it to no avail (HOV lanes with pay-to-use transponders being the latest fashion and cops to enforce the rules slowing everyone else down). Too bad just paying poor people not to use the bridge isn't politically correct. It would be a heck of a lot more efficient than combining a bunch of disincentives that affect the lower classes.
bbarn 9y ago
Can they though? Isn't part of your contract with your employer how difficult it is to get there? I wouldn't take an hour driving commute for my job now, but if you added 30k to my salary? I'd consider it.
moxious 9y ago
How is it that the business is pushing the costs off? If you have a job, you're selling your labor. The commute is part of what you have to do to get your goods to market. Are you, as a purchaser of bananas, "pushing off the costs of transport" on to the seller? That seems silly considering the transporter prices that into the bananas, just like workers can price in longer commutes. Don't accept less money to travel further each day.
- rwmj 9y ago
  It's an unnecessary cost though. It's like if I had a choice to teleport the bananas over the phone, but the buyer insisted that I deliver them by hand. I'd charge that awkward banana-buyer more.
- guelo 9y ago
  If a workplace needs bananas then they have to pay for shipping to get it into the office. Labor is the only workplace input that walks in the door for free. I think a fairer deal would be if commute time counted against the typical 8 hours of work. That way everybody's interests would align around having short commute times.
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    I think most workers factor in the commute when they are looking for and choosing a job (I know I do). Now, we can argue that workers undervalue the time and money they spend commuting, but it is still not 'free' for the employer. Also, not all of the commute cost is the fault of the employer. For example, my commute is a lot shorter than many of my coworkers, because I place more importance on a short commute than a cheaper, bigger house further away. My coworkers value having a bigger house more, so they live where the housing is cheaper but the commute longer. How would your price this in? Would the people who commute further get to work shorter hours, just because I chose to sacrifice for a closer commute?
kenpomeroy 9y ago
Why don't you just find a new job if you aren't happy with your company's employment conditions? Why resort to blanket government intervention instead of just addressing your concerns on an individual level?
savanaly 9y ago
>We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees. This is a severe misunderstanding of the economics of the situation. Employees know that they're going to be spending time commuting, and they take that into account when they decide whether to take a job. In more academic terms-- that information is already informing the labor supply curve of which each individual is a part, and thus the market is already incorporating the information in the wages. If you've ever taken microeconomics 101 then they'll probably have explained how it doesn't matter which side of the market, buyer or seller, pays a tax on business. The tax is incorporated into the price one way or another, whether it's the buyer or the seller that has to actually pony up the physical cash, and the actual tax burden of the two sides has nothing to do with who does that. The same principle applies to commuting, which is after all just a tax that the workers have to pay to the void when they have to wastefully sit around in their car.
- rwmj 9y ago
  The GP's point is that it's an externality for the company, and therefore they have no incentive to reduce the cost of commuting.
  - socalnate1 9y ago
    But this is wrong. It's not an externality for the company. Companies often often go out of their way to reduce this cost. Things like: - Covering the cost of a FastPass - Deciding where to locate a new office based on where employees live - Offering a company shuttle from a train station - "Google Bus" and other similar initiatives - Offering a potential employee a higher salary because of their long commute time These things happen all the time, and all bring a portion of the commute cost into the company.
    - rwmj 9y ago
      Don't know about the US, but in the UK all those are taxable benefits, so they would reduce employees' take-home pay. BTW I've never heard of a company moving for its employees' benefit, unless by "employees" you mean "senior management & board members".
stronglikedan 9y ago
I commute because I love driving (even in a little traffic), I'm not disciplined enough to work from home (and never will be - know thyself), and I like the social aspect of the office (where I am immeasurably more productive). It's a win-win-win for me. I don't even consider telecommuting when looking for work.

imgabe 9y ago

I've thought about this in the past. What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work. On the other hand, employees would have an incentive to try to stretch out their commute as much as possible, to get extra pay for time "not working". I don't know how rampant that would be. I like to think most people hate commuting enough that it wouldn't be worth it to make an extra $20 sitting in traffic when you could just be home faster, but who knows.

mrleinad 9y ago
If the money goes to the government, then you don't have that problem.
sokoloff 9y ago
In the end, setting aside the distortions caused by minimum wage laws, companies pay for the value they receive from their employees. How you want to apportion that value (hours, widgets, hours [including commuting hours], flexible work arrangements, paid time off, company holidays, etc) doesn't matter much. As an employer, I'm indifferent between paying someone $50/hour for an 8-hour work day, or $40/hr for an 8-hour workday plus 2 hours of paid commuting.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  But you would also be incentivized to locate your office in a more commutable location. In some cases, a slightly higher rent would even make sense to offset the costs of paying people to commute.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    Maybe. (In fact, we already care quite a bit about commuting time and ease because we want to retain our developers in a very competitive employment market.) I think it's more likely that the interview process would just have another step to suss out how much commuting time I'd be paying you for, and then figuring out how to divide up your day rate of $400 (higher in reality, of course) across the buckets. So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      > So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day. You'd have to be careful about that. Employers might end up, in data, showing a negative impact against some protected class (married people, certain races) if they weigh hiring or compensation decisions based on proximity to the office. It's my understanding that current jurisprudence doesn't require proof of intention to discriminate, just evidence of disparate impact. Single and married people live in different neighborhoods. Different races do as well, depending on the city. Non-heterosexual people tend to cluster in certain neighborhoods, too, for that matter. If a class action suit can show that married people are paid 10% less than single people for equivalent roles, it could be problematic.
      - sokoloff 9y ago
        Which is all the more reason to make the job the job and the responsibility of getting to the job not [a paid part of] the job.
- computerphage 9y ago
leereeves 9y ago
Interesting idea. Regarding the second point: Employees always have an incentive to try to stretch out their tasks, so employers already know how to minimize that behavior. If employers paid for commuting, commuting would be managed like other tasks.
maxsilver 9y ago
> What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work. I don't know. I worry that would immediately become a major form of discrimination -- it would inherently put anyone who was poor/middle-class or anyone with any sort of family/children at a huge employment disadvantage. Large companies would only ever hire already-hyper-wealthy individuals for their main positions (since they are the only people who are ever allowed to live in dense urban places). I'm imagining employers in Seattle saying "We like this guy, but he doesn't live in Pioneer Square where our office is, so that will be a pain, we should pass on him" Many people already have to deal with that discrimination somewhat in terms of employers only being in major cities. Having that hyper-charged down to just major cities wealthiest neighborhoods seems like an even worse situation.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Yea as someone who has a 2+ hour commute each way, such a policy would doom me to unemployment unless I was willing to take a huge loan and live closer to where the employers are. Good intentions, but bad idea.
- asteli 9y ago
  I don't think we should take it for granted that it's prohibitively expensive to live in cities. That may be the state of metro areas in North America right now (SF, NYC, Vancouver) but historically this isn't a constant. Obviously enough economic incentive exists to convince people to spend the time and effort to commute, but if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included.
  - maxsilver 9y ago
    > if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included. I agree, and would personally do the same too if possible. But I've watched us artificially inflate property values for literally my entire life. Even in my tiny US Midwest city in the middle of nowhere, city center prices have never been remotely affordable. We should take it for granted that it's too expensive to live in US/CA/AUS/NZ cities -- because that's the honest truth. That's been the current state for decades, and there's very little chance that any major city center ever becomes affordable again in our lifetimes. Obviously, we should still try to fix this. I fully support trying. But every facet of our society is wholly dedicated to preventing city centers from ever becoming affordable. Affordable city centers just are not likely to happen. We should not assume regular people live in a situation that doesn't exist, and likely never will.
beojan 9y ago
What if commuting expenses were paid for, but the time spent commuting wasn't?
briffle 9y ago
Or at least encourage you to 'start at 10am' and other times, so that 7:30am-9am is not a single solid rush hour.. Spread the traffic over 3-4 hours, and its much nicer for everyone..
- philsnow 9y ago
  In the bay area the morning crush is anywhere between 6:45 and 11:45. I've sometimes tried the "man traffic looks really bad right now and I don't have any meetings in the morning, I'll wait until later to start my commute" and then check again at 10:30 and it's the same _or worse_.
  - tene 9y ago
    I don't have any particular evidence that this is actually true, instead of just noticing patterns in randomness, but something that feels like it works more often than chance is commuting right after 09:00 or 10:00, on the theory that a significant number of commuters have deadlines on the hour, so traffic might be less immediately after the deadline. It's not completely reliable, so I'm skeptical that it's real, but it also makes a good enough excuse to get me on the road earlier than I would otherwise, so that's nice.
- burntsushi 9y ago
  That's what I do. I commute to Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA. I get into the office at 6:30AM every day and leave by 2:30PM. It's still not a lovely commute---maybe 40 to 50 minutes each way---but it's half the time if I were forced to work 9-5. I pay for this with sleep. It's hard for me to get to sleep before 10PM. :-)
  - gozur88 9y ago
    I tried that one job. Invariably managers would schedule meetings at 3:00, or someone would come to my desk at 2:15 with a task that just had to be finished that day.
    - 9y ago
bluGill 9y ago
In addition to the other negatives, there is also personal life considerations. Most people have a significant other who they want to live with long term, who also works. This throws a bunch of complications into the picture that I can't quite figure out.
rayvd 9y ago
I'm not following. Companies do pay for this. Via salary...
- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  ? Hourly workers who live further away dont get paid more.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    In effect they do, because nobody would commute if there were a job that paid as much closer to home.
    - wolco 9y ago
      It is not true or everyone's pay would go up or down if they moved locations.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      I don't really think you can say that. Labor is not a perfect market.
      - gozur88 9y ago
        It's close enough over large groups of people. On average you're going to make more money doing the same thing in SF, for example, than you would in the East Bay.
        s73ver_ 9y ago
        I wouldn't be comfortable agreeing to that statement.
pascalxus 9y ago
It's a good idea in principle, but... Also, you have to remember, in places like the bay area, you can't just pick up and move closer to work. People have enormous incentives to never move: Proposition 13 means you get 5 times lower property taxes by staying put. Not to mention the enormous imbalance between housing and jobs. All the jobs are on the peninnsula and all the housing is in the east bay. All these problems would just be amplified. I think we're miss-stating the problem. The problem isn't that employers are forcing us to commute long distances with poor company placement. The problem is, we as employees don't have enough power to choose/demand where we want to work. There's simply too much labor supply and too little demand. So, if a worker demands to work remotely, the company can just say: we'll fire this guy and hire one of the countless others willing to commute 2 hours or more. Just to prove my point: Here in the bay area, companies still place themselves on the penninsula where there's a 4 to 1 ratio of jobs to residential places to live. By that math, they shouldn't be able to hire anyone. And yet, they're having absolutely no problem filling positions, because workers are extremely desperate for money. So desperate, they're willing commute 2 hours or pay 60% of their paycheck to live closer. These are all symptoms of labor oversupply and too little labor demand.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  And yet, we keep hearing about a shortage of developers.
mac01021 9y ago
> What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They already do. I'll take a lower salary from a company that doesn't make me commute.

briandear 9y ago

Who ultimately pays for this congestion tax? The employees in the form of lower salaries, the customers in the form of higher prices and the shareholders in the form of lower profits. I prefer an alternative approach: a telecommuting incentive tax credit. Telecommuters themselves get a tax credit and companies also get a tax credit. That would be the fastest way to spur more remote friendly workplaces. Then the environment, congestion, commute stress, etc will all be reduced. The "cost" of the credit would be more than offset by reduced road maintenance costs, lower pollution, fewer accidents, etc. Unless you're dealing with customers directly, or making a physical product, there's no reason that offices in their conventional form should exist.

ashark 9y ago
You... prefer the version that makes everyone pay for telecommuters, rather than making only those who directly interact with non-telecommuter companies pay, and which is more open to being gamed/scammed? Why?
timthelion 9y ago
Tax credits are, IMO, a bad thing for normal people. Most people do not know have the know-how to take advantage of them.
drchickensalad 9y ago
So then what about the government revenue loss from tax credits?
wpietri 9y ago
Everybody's already paying the congestion tax. They just pay in time, health, and lost productivity. But since it's a negative externality, the incentive to fix it is blunted. If a congestion tax worked, the overall burden would go down, because businesses would work harder to locate offices near where employees are (or want to be). And they'd also likely get more active in things like housing and transit policy, because it would be to their direct financial benefit to make sure that development was more balanced.

ataturk 9y ago

Something has to happen--my commute is only 11 miles but it often takes 40 minutes because of a stupid bridge that has had every social engineering plot applied to it to no avail (HOV lanes with pay-to-use transponders being the latest fashion and cops to enforce the rules slowing everyone else down). My career has suffered because I have never wanted the stress of a long commute nor could I afford the real estate prices and city problems involved with being closer in. It's a bunch of diminishing returns every direction I look, so my solution was to just find work that was less desirable but at least manageable in the context of my whole life situation. I contend that people who don't do that eventually suffer mental breakdowns, but have no evidence to back up that claim other than conjecture. As it stands, my current commute is still bad, but I bet it's only 10% as bad as the hell most people around here go through. I've decided that working for a living is just generally bad for health, but a necessary evil, of course. I probably sound like a whiner, but I am truly interested in the commuting problem because I work for a company that heavily promotes cycling to work and ride sharing. Unfortunately, the infrastructure between my home and my work location precludes safe cycling along much of the route so I don't do it, but a lot of employees do. Instead, I stupidly get up at 5:45am, get out the door by 6:30am or so, creep along on a stupid, dark bridge with lots of other stupid people, then arrive to work around 7am or so, depending on the breaks. At least the drive home isn't as bad as long as I'm on the road by 3:15pm or so. I do get the occasional work from home day, but our team is highly collaborative, so I'm at a disadvantage if I'm not at the office. In previous roles I had more autonomy and could thus make a better go of remote work. I worry that 100% remote roles make you a non-entity in your organization and thus dispensable.

sokoloff 9y ago
Not being effective enough is what puts you at risk of being dispensable. Being remote might contribute to, or increase the risk of, not being effective, but it's not the most proximate cause.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>a stupid bridge that has had every social engineering plot applied to it to no avail (HOV lanes with pay-to-use transponders being the latest fashion and cops to enforce the rules slowing everyone else down). Too bad just paying poor people not to use the bridge isn't politically correct. It would be a heck of a lot more efficient than combining a bunch of disincentives that affect the lower classes.

bbarn 9y ago

Can they though? Isn't part of your contract with your employer how difficult it is to get there? I wouldn't take an hour driving commute for my job now, but if you added 30k to my salary? I'd consider it.

moxious 9y ago

How is it that the business is pushing the costs off? If you have a job, you're selling your labor. The commute is part of what you have to do to get your goods to market. Are you, as a purchaser of bananas, "pushing off the costs of transport" on to the seller? That seems silly considering the transporter prices that into the bananas, just like workers can price in longer commutes. Don't accept less money to travel further each day.

rwmj 9y ago
It's an unnecessary cost though. It's like if I had a choice to teleport the bananas over the phone, but the buyer insisted that I deliver them by hand. I'd charge that awkward banana-buyer more.
guelo 9y ago
If a workplace needs bananas then they have to pay for shipping to get it into the office. Labor is the only workplace input that walks in the door for free. I think a fairer deal would be if commute time counted against the typical 8 hours of work. That way everybody's interests would align around having short commute times.
- cortesoft 9y ago
  I think most workers factor in the commute when they are looking for and choosing a job (I know I do). Now, we can argue that workers undervalue the time and money they spend commuting, but it is still not 'free' for the employer. Also, not all of the commute cost is the fault of the employer. For example, my commute is a lot shorter than many of my coworkers, because I place more importance on a short commute than a cheaper, bigger house further away. My coworkers value having a bigger house more, so they live where the housing is cheaper but the commute longer. How would your price this in? Would the people who commute further get to work shorter hours, just because I chose to sacrifice for a closer commute?

kenpomeroy 9y ago

Why don't you just find a new job if you aren't happy with your company's employment conditions? Why resort to blanket government intervention instead of just addressing your concerns on an individual level?

savanaly 9y ago

>We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees. This is a severe misunderstanding of the economics of the situation. Employees know that they're going to be spending time commuting, and they take that into account when they decide whether to take a job. In more academic terms-- that information is already informing the labor supply curve of which each individual is a part, and thus the market is already incorporating the information in the wages. If you've ever taken microeconomics 101 then they'll probably have explained how it doesn't matter which side of the market, buyer or seller, pays a tax on business. The tax is incorporated into the price one way or another, whether it's the buyer or the seller that has to actually pony up the physical cash, and the actual tax burden of the two sides has nothing to do with who does that. The same principle applies to commuting, which is after all just a tax that the workers have to pay to the void when they have to wastefully sit around in their car.

rwmj 9y ago
The GP's point is that it's an externality for the company, and therefore they have no incentive to reduce the cost of commuting.
- socalnate1 9y ago
  But this is wrong. It's not an externality for the company. Companies often often go out of their way to reduce this cost. Things like: - Covering the cost of a FastPass - Deciding where to locate a new office based on where employees live - Offering a company shuttle from a train station - "Google Bus" and other similar initiatives - Offering a potential employee a higher salary because of their long commute time These things happen all the time, and all bring a portion of the commute cost into the company.
  - rwmj 9y ago
    Don't know about the US, but in the UK all those are taxable benefits, so they would reduce employees' take-home pay. BTW I've never heard of a company moving for its employees' benefit, unless by "employees" you mean "senior management & board members".

stronglikedan 9y ago

I commute because I love driving (even in a little traffic), I'm not disciplined enough to work from home (and never will be - know thyself), and I like the social aspect of the office (where I am immeasurably more productive). It's a win-win-win for me. I don't even consider telecommuting when looking for work.