It is amazing how I manage to rationalize sitting in traffic for that amount of time every day to myself.
The United States has been consumed with car culture which has bled time and resources from individuals like yourself. But it also is responsible for endless tragedy in the form of accidents and financial overextension.
Car culture, partly driven by commuting, has inflated the need for some systems and created entire rent-seeking businesses that could be any number of more useful and interesting investments of human time and capital.
I believe a silver lining of the Coronavirus and the actions of political representatives and appointees that have allowed covid to foster will ultimately result in progression in many outdated norms we experienced up through 2020.
Also driving is such a waste of human potential, I don't think the amount of attention needed to drive safely is worth the monotony/tediousness of driving. It's wasted time on a large scale.
I have no interest in cars and find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status, so I agree with your statement. But, people have different interests... some will spend their money travelling or playing golf, and some people just like cars!
Not trying to be a gatekeeper but if I think about myself I know I "felt social pressure" (grew up in a culture that glorifies this material item and sets an expect ion of success/fulfillment) to get a car. I guess you could argue that social pressures like this can grow naturally and I suppose I agree that they can but I don't think this one grew naturally and for some people promotes values that they may not hold.
Cars as status symbols, I think, is troubling at the scale they're at. If you enjoy to ride around or appreciate their engineering then by all means.
Even as I type this I think if you want to splurge on a Car that you will just take social media pictures with to make you feel good and show others then I think you should, more power to you, do what makes you happy.
I guess my problem is that "what makes you happy" .. "is a fancy car" (you can go in debt to get) is a message that is "loud" and unlike a house (arguably the other functional yet status symbol) is within reach of people who it isn't in their best interest to get.
I think it's a nuanced subject because as most things in life it's mixed up in all aspects of human life like financial education and personal responsibility but what I'm saying is that current "car culture" (to sweep away all the nuance) doesn't feel right to me right now and I think causes a lot of harm.
Yeah, I wonder when the perception will shift to represent reality. I sometimes see people with cars that are more expensive than you'd expect by the neighbourhood, but my default first thought is that it's either leased or backed by a loan, so nothing to really brag about.
So is cooking, eating, sleeping, daydreaming...
I won't try to glorify a banal commute, but moving from place to place is pretty fundamental to living.
Driving in traffic stress is external, reduces my faith in humanity, and is most often unavoidable. The end result (was) often that I was at work or home late. Not enjoyable.
For me at least.
Now I have a 9-mile commute and I am using the empty side of the freeway both ways. Sometimes I take a coastal byway on the way home if it's summer.
Anecdotally I don't think this is true for walking and cycling commutes.
I've definitely had easy / comfy commutes. 10am-7pm workday, missed most traffic, easy 20 min rides, sometimes a little longer in the evening. Drive took me past a grocery store and a liquor store, so I could stop off and grab things. I don't miss it, but it wasn't a soul crushing slog.
I routinely freak out while cooking.
This shouldn’t be depressing, this should give you hope. Imagine a world where even the poorest of people can have access to luxuries of their choosing.
The alternative is a world where if you are poor, you must drive a beat up car or more likely have no car at all, while the upper classes drive shiny brand new cars that become more powerful status symbol, because now the poor unwashed masses can no longer get their grimy hands on them. This widens the inequality gap, and stimulates rage.
And believe me, many people who have grown up with nothing aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the real goal should be “peace of mind” or sound financial decisions, rather than having a new car or whatever. What’s the average savings rate again?
Better to placate them with shiny objects and a consumerized roadmap to happiness than to tell them they’re poor and need to live accordingly so they can find happiness another way, while everybody else gets to be happy by buying cool shit.
There were expensive cars rolling around though: due to rich people were passing through from expansive suburbs to the financial district, creating pollution and externalities that the poor neighbourhood had insufficient power to deal with.
So even the well off have to deal with these "externalities".
Our road is also in poor shape and had no shoulder to begin with. It is not meant for this level of traffic.
I don't see how cars can be status symbols if you can just buy a 3 year old car at a steep discount. Nobody is going to know the difference between a new car owner that kept his car for more than 3 years and someone who bought a 3 year old used car.
Having a car comes with a great deal of utility and freedom.
Commuting is almost entirely driven by city centers and population density that inflates real estate/rent costs so high that living out farther and driving in seems to not only make sense, but be the rational choice.
Aside from having a sales office in a densely populated area, there’s almost no real value to other functions of a business being located in the middle of a huge city.
In fact, you could argue that what will suffer is living close to suburban office nodes in order to save commute times. Even more young people may choose to live in cities if they can avoid the schlep out to their suburban office (think Google bused from SF to Mountain View, but where you only need to take them for big meetings in the office rather than every day).
According to the research you mentioned[1], the "network effect" you mentioned raises wages moderately for uneducated people and a little for educated people. But still nowhere near enough to account for the astronomical rent prices in a city.
They also show that educated cities grow faster than uneducated cities, but don't make a comparison to smaller towns and suburbs.
I see no reason why cities are objectively better. They are convenient for some segment of the population, and they are very unenjoyable for some segment of the population.
[1]https://gulzar05.blogspot.com/2011/02/ode-to-cities.html?m=1
Rent prices are just a matter of greed. Cities make themselves business friendly to bring in more taxes but do not pay attention of how to house workers. If they wanted to prevent gentrification they'd start by kicking out companies, not the people that have lived there for decades. The reality is that all this bullshit is about making money. Land owners want a higher ROI so kicking out companies is a no go but building more housing is a no go too.
(For my personal case, I have a car and drive a lot, but rarely for commuting. I usually commute by bicycle+Caltrain, and only use car for commuting when it rains, to drive to my nearest Bart station, as I really don't like to bike in the rain. Lucky for me it rarely rains in the Bay Area.)
It's actually lack of density that inflates the costs. Nearly every major US city has zoning laws that keep density much lower than what the market would support, which artificially restricts supply and increases prices. If city cores allowed increased density, housing costs would be lower in both the city and the suburbs, and as a bonus, fewer people would need to drive.
I see all the talk of higher density living without car ownership as primarily driven by corporate interests to keep labor more concentrated and more easily controlled (secondarily driven by cohorts of people who haven't experienced anything better than that and therefore wanting to keep status quo), at the expense of quality of life for the average person. The monied interests wouldn't care one way or another in lowering this standard of living, but I'm surprised to see how many ordinary citizens get swept up by the rhetoric.
I'm open to arguments about environmental impact (and also others may prefer the NY style of living and that's fine too), but I generally see a lot of negativity about cars on in this (HN) culture that runs counter to my own preferences, and the apparent revealed preferences of a huge portion of Americans. Inflated real estate costs due to lack of mobility also meant I could afford a much bigger place in LA than in Manhattan.
Car culture is a very different problem and affects people who don’t commute
Now, working from home, I often start the day with a bike ride, but since I’m not forced to go between two specific points, I can choose a route that has a lot less risk. I am also not limited by the length of my commute, so rather than 40 minutes of riding split in two 20-minute segments, I can instead ride for a full hour if I want.
When (if?) it’s time to go back into the office, I will go back to using a steel cage with crumple zones and air bags to traverse the dangerous intersections. The cycling for fun and exercise will continue to be on my own terms with whatever routes I think are safest.
1. Cycling is only permitted on cycling paths.
2. Cycling may not exceed 5 MPH.
3. Required gear includes leather pants, a leather jacket, a helmet, a mouth guard, a crotch guard, boots, gloves, safety glasses, and a wearable air bag system.
4. Plates (a.k.a. "tags") with inspection stickers are required. Safety inspections will be quarterly.
5. Licenses will be required. Licensing implies consent for random drug testing.
Distance between homes and offices is the problem; cars are the worst solution except for all the others.
Public transit "sucks" for a number of reasons, many of them car-related: (-) buses have to share roads with cars, so they have to put up with the congestion they are trying to solve, (-) money that would have been spent on public transit is being spent on road expansions to "solve traffic", and others.
> cars are the worst solution except for all the others.
This doesn't explain cities that have successful public transit systems...
We wouldn't have built our offices and homes so far from each other if the expectation was to walk/bike/bus everywhere.
Unfortunately this is a chicken-and-egg problem, where things may need to get worse temporarily for things to get better.
Do these cities simply have terrible private transit options?
I don’t know anyone who would prefer to take public transport except in cities with poor car infrastructure.
I do know lots of people who would rather walk or bike to work.
Even in those cities very few enjoy taking public transport - and would drive if they had free parking, didn’t have to pay tolls, didn’t think it was terrible for the environment, etc
So basically your argument is that people would drive if it weren't terrible in every way? By that logic, people would eat plutonium... if only it were more available, tasted good, and didn't kill you.
Why would that be the goal?
Where I live, my commute to work by bus is only 7 minutes slower than doing the same commute driving myself alone. And for those 7 minutes, I do not have to pay any attention except once to remember to get off at the appropriate stop for a transfer. (I could avoid the transfer by walking but I'm not that motivated.) And I am not concerned with not being able to rush out for an emergency because my employer, or my county if my employer did not offer this benefit, will call me a taxi if I need to leave in a hurry and arrived to work without driving myself.
Because the bulk of my transport needs are now handled, I can also see what the transport network can do for me in other areas. As of two years ago, my family moved to a place in our city where we need not own a car, so we sold our last one. If we desire one for a few hours or a day, there are services (far cheaper than the few hundred dollars per month required to maintain one for our exclusive use) that will provide one upon request. They even take care of fuel.
We can make these choices to wean from cars; we choose not to. And at what cost to ourselves, our neighbors, and our planet?
Driving you need to pay attention and navigating traffic and worst of all stand in a smog filled traffic jam on a highway, which is absolutely awful.
Cars and their associated infrastructure (roads, parking) cause and/or enable the distance.
https://ggwash.org/view/36573/to-a-pedestrian-a-roads-a-tiny...
Which is a valid reason, as the data clearly shows the benefits of growing up in neighborhoods with high income earners, and the disadvantages of growing up in neighborhoods with low income earners:
Of course being in a wealthy area is better than being in a poor area. But does the existence of such areas benefit society? What would it look like if more neighborhoods were mixed income and public resources were shared equitably?
An imbalance will cause discord and disorder. Hopefully you catch yourself on the right side of it. Prioritizing cars is very much a “me and my immediate family” above all else move, and that can be an easy choice when you don’t see others as belonging to your tribe, or vice versa.
Roads are still necessary for delivery, garbage disposal, emergency services (fire engine, ambulances, police cars) and construction equipment. The picture is extreme to the point that it fails to deliver it's message.
Fewer cars means fewer lanes are needed. I’ve seen intersections 9 or 10 lanes wide in US cities. How can any senior citizen walk across 9 lanes of traffic, especially at night. One or two lanes is sufficient for all infrastructure like waste removal or emergency services.
But the root of the problem is insufficiently dense living. People have to make a choice to sacrifice their expansive living quarters (such as in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manhattan, London, etc), otherwise the whole public transit and de-prioritizing motor vehicles doesn’t work.
As I explained in other comments, obviously people do want their space. But is that a luxury they can afford? They’re future generations can afford in terms of infrastructure debt repayments and environmental damage? Health damage from over reliance on cars? I guess we’ll see...but I’m betting not.
It would involve me driving my car something like 15 minutes to the nearest train station and paying for parking (an amenity that is free at my employer's office). Then I'd have to take something like two different trains, followed by two bus rides which would drop me off at a location that is about 3/4th of a mile away from the office. The walk is then along a route that is not pedestrian friendly in any way because it partially along the major access ramps on/off a tollway.
So yeah. :(
The whole point is that in a dense city, you don't need to cover a long distance. 75% of car trips in NYC are under 5 miles, which is an easy distance to cycle with proper infrastructure.
What % of people who work in NYC have a commute to work of under 5 miles?
Oh, I guess this is why low-density Florida and Texas are doing so well with Coronavirus, and all those super-dense Asian cities are having a tough time managing it.
Of course, if people are super dense between the ears disease transmission starts becoming more of a hazard. General population density evidently has little to do with it.
> The United States has been consumed with car culture which has bled time and resources from individuals like yourself.
But all of the problems being discussed here are related to commuting; none are related to cars.
Commuting through a big subway system takes just as much time while being much less pleasant.
PS. Even now, not all manufacturing is done in China.
"People who trust only you" is to managers as "code nobody else understands" is to engineers: job security, and a springboard for making you look like a hero and so getting you recognition/promotions. And it's hard to develop relationships like that, if you can't just wander over to those people and have in-person (i.e. not on-the-record in the company's logs) conversations.
To exactly the degree that your company resembles a feudalist society, you'll see managers excited to have their own physically distinct office units/departments/working groups, where they can most-effectively hoard and develop private talent pools on the company's dime. And you'll see them heavily resist anything that makes that talent-pool of theirs less private, e.g. WFH, cross-departmental collaboration, "war rooms" during emergencies, etc.
There are certainly opportunities where workers in developing countries can do the same job for substantially less money, but very few companies do the hard work of really integrating these workers with their existing teams so it's just colonialism 2.0 where westerners who are trusted by management are told to create robotic tasks for the cheap labor in such a way that no one can meaningfully fuck it up. It creates a predictable result.
On more of a 25-50 year perspective, it has always been impossible for the majority of the world to be lifted out of poverty without those people eventually competing with us. The 20th century economic advantage and resulting broad equality of prosperity in the US and western Europe was a historical fluke of right place, right time that will likely never be repeated. I expect developed countries to start looking a lot more like developing countries do now in terms of economic equality.
I started my career in Poland, just before the foreign startups decided it's an interesting market to outsource to. A number of US owned startups and medium-sized tech companies started offering salaries 2-3x higher than the local firms. I moved from a place where my last conversation was "No web developer can hope for more than $4/h rate, come on" to, well, a $10/h place. A lot of this was made easier by EU, a lot was just US companies being encouraged by the economic growth, stability and the prospect of saving the half of their bottom line. With salaries at ~$20-30k a year everyone was happier than before.
Then a natural thing happened, the market became increasingly competitive. Ten years later, a good senior developer in Poland could earn $60k, but crucially, costed the company close to $100k due to employer taxes and other costs of running business. Some companies are fine with it, but some understand that it's ever closer to what an employee in their HQ costs, and some are slowing down the growth or moving out alltogether. Surprise, over-the-pond communication is not so easy even on a good day, and there are cultural differences to deal with too. Some moved further east, I'm curious to see how that plays out.
Going back to the remote work pushing down the salaries, I think that's unlikely to be the reason, because lower wage locations are rarely saving that much in the long run. Maybe we see a temporary dip, but I also look forward to moving out of big city and lowering my cost of living.
What I think is more likely is that the economy shrinks and the endless supply of engineering jobs dries out, moving us back to employer's market. That can have all kinds of ripple effects on the local and outsourced jobs.
However prior to COVID19 I was on two to three days at home for the past few years so adopting to everyday at home has been easy.
In a way I see my commute hours being productive as free time at work, meaning I can knock stuff out without feeling obligated to reply to emails; because I am not "really" at work yet.
I was always shocked at how many people were willing to spend 50 hours a month driving just to save $500 on rent... is your tone really only worth $10 an hour?
Now, I am totally screwed because I pay more and no one commutes anyway.
Your rubric isn't very useful. Else you would conclude that taking heroin or posting on HN all day must be the most valuable way to spend your time.
You don't account for the fact that we actively sabotage our true ambitions. Not many of us are on HN going "definitely glad I'm here wasting my time instead of working towards things that actually fulfill me." It's just constant procrastination.
Being unable to identify this procrastination usually stems from rationalization. "Hmm, if something was more important to me, I'd surely be doing it!" being a great example of that faulty bargaining.
By the same token, exercise isn't worthless just because most of us avoid it. And we are often slaves to what is easy to do.
What is easy to do doesn't always agree with what we want to do.
Considering that I don't make time for heroin use, I believe by my metric that I don't find it valuable. Or else I would use it. Conversely, I don't spend all day on HN because the value degrades as the day goes by. This kind of response is wholly inappropriate. As you yourself point out
> podcasts compete with surfing the internet, Netflix, etc.
So what I'm suggesting is that you are placing higher (satisfaction) value over surfing the internet, Netflix, etc over the value of podcasts.
> Being unable to identify this procrastination usually stems from rationalization. "Hmm, if something was more important to me, I'd surely be doing it!" being a great example of that faulty bargaining.
You are misreading. Asking if you find value (what kind of value?) in podcasts is a driving question. The question may be rhetorical in nature but the answer isn't simply "I don't make time for it ipso facto it is not valuable to me." Rather the answer is deeper and not singular, coming to possible different conclusions: "podcasts aren't as valuable as the other things I prioritize" or "podcasts are more valuable than the things I am prioritizing over it, maybe I should re-prioritize." You may fail at the latter, but the question and (personal) answer is necessary if you are to take that step. Either you convince yourself that you're placing too much weight on the value of podcasts and that the relaxing nature of surfing the internet and Netflix is more valuable to you, relaxing IS a valuable and necessary part of existence (yes, people go too far). Or you need to evaluate and work at extracting more value within your day, be that with podcasts, exercise, whatever. No one, except you, implied that such a task is easy. The whole point of the question is to get you to prod yourself and push you to make a decision on the answer instead of just expressing frustration. What you choose is up to you at this point as well as how you choose to accomplish your answer.
Additionally I should mention that there are different types of value and what that means to people is different. Don't discount stress relief in the form of "slacking off" as not valuable. You can't be running in high gear all the time. This statement also doesn't ignore addiction unless you are not giving a good faith reading.
> And we are often slaves to what is easy to do.
Do not fall into this trap. Addiction is treatable and you can get out of it. It isn't easy, but it is treatable. You are not subjugated to that existence forever.
> What is easy to do doesn't always agree with what we want to do.
Who claimed this? Rather I'll say that not everything that is critical is a personal attack and often we package complex questions that require the listener to make difficult decisions into compact statements as an intentional method to get the other person to think hard about the question. Frankly because no one can give you an answer but yourself and thus it is woefully inappropriate to do so. So a mechanism is needed to get you to do such a task. This is not an attack on you unless you make it one. The pattern which I have just discussed is littered all throughout this response. What it means to be a good faith response is to think about the intention of the words and not just your interpretation (which both are different than the literal words). It does not mean you have to agree, but it does mean you have to demonstrate that you listened.
So on one hand I get what you're saying, I personally spent 3 hours per day commuting and I'm so grateful to have put that behind me now, at the same time if I'm overworking now it's mostly because I don't know when to stop the day.
To put it another way, what I hear you saying that your work is the most interesting thing in your life right now and so, of course, you spend most of your time doing it. If you had other things in your life that we equally or more interesting...
Okay long story short here is my advice: Just do it. Do it every day. If you find something more important and interesting then do that instead.
Of course it is even better if you have found something that is more important to you than everything else. There is no shame in doing the same thing for years.
Of course you do. Stop at 8 hours.
I may be weird, but I enjoyed my commute prior to COVID. I purposely avoided the Interstate Highway, even though it would have saved me 10 minutes, in favor of backroads that have less traffic. Then during my commute, I listen to Audiobooks.
I kind of felt that this was my personal time just for me to listen to the books I liked. At work and home, there are always people clamoring for my time and attention, but my commute was just me time.
In addition, I have a vehicle with stop and go, automatic cruise control, so even a traffic jamb is not all that stressful.