The Insanity of Driving

Corporations don't REALLY care about people. They aren't going to invest large amounts of money to acquire and develop nearby property to be lived in by transient workers. Doing so would represent a huge assumption of liability on the company's part, the cost thereof most likely would be passed on to the employee. Work is soul sucking enough as is. Living in a company town with all the strings attached that would entail would likely make matters even more depressing.

Self-driving vehicles are nowhere NEAR "basic-AI". It takes a well-developed teenager of a ripe 16+ years to even get to the point we as a society are even comfortable TRAINING them to drive, and God help the one's with a Y chromosome come time to pay the insurance.

And finally, think of the freedom gained by one who learns to operate a vehicle. You unlock a form of mobility unmatched by any mode of locomotion naturally evolved. You have opened to you the collective infrastructure built by man to enable you to travel and transact. If there is any question that should be asked with regards to automotive travel and work, it should be, why don't we travel more for our own edification, rather than for someone else's?

For the current generation at least, the answer seems to be wage stagnation/stratification. A phenomena uniquely addressable from the very same corporations whose altruism is being appealed to in this article.

Western countries appear more and more dysfunctional as an emerging result of their citizens inability to collectively take action. The illness is not in the mind, its between the minds. It is a social illness.

Countless people have wondered, amateurs and professionals alike, why so many people commute even when jobs and housing are available in proximity, and not just concentrated in the employment centers like SV, but it always boils down to the same basic setup: supply and demand feeding into pricing, disposable incomes feeding into pricing, zoning and regulations feeding into issues with the demand-matching supply, and a bunch of individuals trying to optimize their circumstances given several constraints.

My first jobs were all within walking distance of where I lived. After that I got jobs on the bus route. But that didn't always work out great - miss a bus by a couple of minutes, or if they miss each other at the transfer station, and you're an hour or two late from waiting for the next bus.

Eventually I ended up in a place and career where commuting was pretty much necessary - jobs were spread over a wide area across multiple towns/cities. And intercity transit is far far worse than local buses. Carpooling to the rescue. The commute sucked, but we had each other's conversation and the audiobooks.

Now I work from home, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I've gained 2 hours a day. The company gets the best of me, instead of me tired and frazzled from transit. It's cheaper and safer. It's a win-win.

Being on a remote-oriented team, it's been said multiple times by people in the office that we talk more than they do to each other. And that matches my experience from having worked in an office.

Driving is insane, especially for commuting, and doubly-so if the job can be done remotely. Cars are extremely expensive not just to buy but to maintain and operate, and yet they spend almost all of their time just sitting in a parking space doing nothing but wasting space. It's a total waste. We can do better.

Someday we'll be explaining to our descendants how we used to spend half our income for a giant box that you had to drag around everywhere you went and constantly pour money into, and then you would just sit in it for hours wishing that you weren't, because that was the fad back then.

The situation in US is that public transport doesn't reach suburbs/exurbs, because the routes are generally low in passengers due lower population density - thus not profitable. There are of course more reasons why people choose living without public transport.

The psychology of suburbs/exurbs is against public or shared utility like public transport, because it forces social cohesion and interaction will all of society layers(while private transport is segregated by location and limited to those who have vehicles). Its ingrained in US culture that personal homes, cars and guns are symbols of independent life - a certain brand of lifestyle that diametrically opposite to city life.

People should understand this lifestyle has costs and inefficiencies that exist solely due spreading the population too thin to support services such as public transport. Any business or organization will naturally form to service large concentrations of users, focusing on cities-first, because this simplifies logistics and transport.

People complain often that their area is only serviced by one company(e.g. internet) or even none. They don't really understand why there isn't competition or diversity of service providers for their needs. Their lifestyle teaches them its normal and everything else must accommodate it.

Summary: Author doesn't like commuting, wonders why companies expect people to do it, then hopes for a self driving car future as though this somehow solves the problem.

Understatement of the century.