I heard somewhere that if you remove 20% of the vehicles in peak hour, you'd eradicate something like two thirds of all traffic jams. Roads have always been designed to serve demand, which is a problem when your demand looks like this during any given day: There's been talks of introducing per-mile-driven taxes over here. The last time that was on the political table, it also included a 'peak-hour-tax'. I'm rooting for that idea to make its return.
Oh hells yeah, dude. 2008? With the economy in ruins and oil at $140/bbl? Every shit service sector job no longer paid for itself if you have to burn $30 in gas to make $45 for the day. A vast swath of the Inland Empire stayed the fuck home. Los Angeles was EMPTY. The air was clear. The roads were wide open. It was fucking amazing. The problem is that American cities evolved under the automobile, which means they're all about point-to-point. A hub/spoke paradigm simply doesn't suit vast swaths of American suburbia. And thus are we mired.
All of the time, I think about how stupid it is that we don't have staggered shifts. I know it's potentially disruptive for meetings, but many face-to-face meetings could be just as effective if they were teleconferences. Blue collar work is another entirely separate beast. I'm pretty spoiled, though. Work hasn't been an attendance grade for me since early 2015, but I've never worked as hard as I have since then. I have about two or three teleconferences each week, and then there's only one afternoon a week where I schedule all my meetings and actually have to be physically present somewhere. There are people I know who have a 1+ hour commute (one way!) entirely in a car. In Texas, it's actually a status symbol to move as far as possible from the urban center you work at, and then drive the largest truck that can fit in your garage. We had better be taxing the hell out of fossil fuels within a decade, because these idiots can't think beyond their wallet, and we're not developing a social stigma around carbon emissions nearly fast enough.
I highly disagree. As someone who can work whenever and wherever he wants, with only meetings to tether me to the office, I much prefer 30 minutes of in-person chat to a 30-minute call. I regularly go to the office longer than I need to or on days where I have no appointments there because random run-ins and quick brainstorm chats definitely have their value. Go read this if you haven't already. Students have free public transport over here, which has resulted in enormous growth in peak demands since that free card was introduced. So now many cities over here have staggered their rosters; school A starts at 8:30, and school B at 9:00 so that they don't all want the same 8:15 bus. Some cities reach out to their biggest employers. Half of all jobs in my city were either in higher ed or at the massive hospital, so the city got them to cooperate as well, staggering shifts and giving employees benefits for 'peak-avoidance'. It's hard to measure the impact of it all, but it's definitely a solution that works on a smaller scale.I know it's potentially disruptive for meetings, but many face-to-face meetings could be just as effective if they were teleconferences.
No, I will definitely concede that face-to-face interaction is an incredible thing, and I much prefer it to anything else. My problem is that what I'm working on is fairly narrow, and there isn't really anyone around my workplace doing the same thing. There are some other folks working on the same thing, but they're scattered all around the world. We meet up every couple of months for face-to-face researchin', and I feel pretty terrible about it, because airplane carbon emissions. I've said it before, but I think it's very important that we at least start trying to adopt VR teleconferencing. Ugh, that little bit of latency has already burned me, though.