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Comment by simonmesmith | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, I often wonder why cities don’t promote local telecommuting over building expensive public transportation infrastructure. Building one kilometre of subway costs anywhere from around $100 million to $1.6 billion (https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/events/how-much-does-it-cost...), and then requires subsidies to run. Why not use this money to provide incentives for people to telecommute?

And while some might say, “but then people who rely on public transit for things other than commuting to work would be hurt,” note that most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns. Example: https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2022/01/public-transit-service....

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> [Subway] then requires subsidies to run

I wish we used the same logic for roads/streets as well. Except for toll roads, which only get a partial subsidy, roads are fully subsidized by the taxpayer.

Since others get fully subsidized roads for their private vehicles, I argue public transit should be fully subsidized as well.

Yeah let's increase car dependence. Great idea.

If people are mainly working from home then we can redirect public transit from business parks or whatever towards places people still want to go (e.g. shopping, nightlife, events) but without a car. Starving already often underfunded public transit is not the answer.

Why not use the hundreds of millions spent on highways to subsidize people to work from home instead? Most commuters in North America are not using public transit but highways.

Subsidizing people in affluent, remote-work jobs is not a good allocation of resources. By all means, work from home, but subsidies should mostly help the people in the bottom two thirds of the income ladder.

You're right but we do already heavily subsidize those kinds of people with things like highways, tax credits for EVs etc.

nah, imho tax should go towards quality of life and stability. Working from home might not be good for promotions it will allow hiring competent people who cant [atm] afford living nearby. Dumb short term gigs gives one a chance to show ones performance.

I do manual labor but i could/should/might be a software developer. Not sure, im definitely not going to give up what i have to relocate. Give me work/tasks and we will see i havent got what it takes or do and if the pay and stability is there to give up what i have for it. They already cant find people. Reduce it further and salaries will have to change.

Bc local telecommuting means there’s no city center, no commercial traffic there, no business tax base. Look at what’s happening to downtown SF. You can debate whether it’s taking the city in a good direction or not, but few elected officials are going to endorse their city becoming smaller or having less income.

Not all jobs can be done by telecommuting. It's a great solution for office work, but it doesn't work so well for manufacturing, retail or the service industry.

> most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns.

Does it? Work-related travel is mostly during morning and late afternoon, but public transit also runs outside those hours. In my experience public transit works quite well for non-commuting travel. Of course this can vary wildly by country, but the claim that public transit only really serves commuters is not universally true.

I don’t know about universally true, so you may be right that there are exceptions, but as one example, such as linked above, public transit tends to underserve the needs of female caregivers who often need to make multiple short trips rather than two long trips each day.

> the claim that public transit only really serves commuters is not universally true.

It is always partially true, but each city is different. People who travel in the very early hours (like 2:30am) always have problems, (even the best cities run reduced and thus inconvenient service for maintenance reasons, most give up on transit completely). While those hours are not common it is safe to bet everyone reading this has had reason to travel at those times at least one night in their life.

In far too many cities, (and not just in the US) additional service is run during the peaks. By additional service I mean they run more buses/trains as opposed something with more seats (that is longer). This means people who travel at non-peak hours have to be careful about when they travel to ensure there is service without waiting. Of course if the wait is still less than 5 minutes nobody cares, but as waits get longer - humans don't have time for that.

>> Similarly, I often wonder why cities don’t promote local telecommuting over building expensive public transportation infrastructure.

Because if they promote it too much, they people move far away and the city loses the tax base. One extreme example is New York City -- they have a 3.5% income tax. If you move into next-door NJ or CT, the city loses that 3.5% income.

This is part of it - once you're telecommuting then one of the main things holding you to a particular area is gone.

And once telecommuting is common in a given company, the workers begin to disperse, first to "driving distance" and then to "anywhere in a reasonable timezone".

We already saw how badly Covid hit city centers, perpetual work-from-home would be worse; causing a mini-Detroit in many cities.

I don't think expensive public transport is the problem. It can be crucial for some people. The fact that the article says some people need "short stops on trips to and from work, short-distance trips and a higher frequency of trips" just means the public transport needs to be tweaked, not completely scrapped.

This would appear to go into a much more fundamental questions about our society.

Currently, when we see recession, we can increase government spending. This is usually done in infrastructure – we give people a job, and in return we get infrastructure, nice!

But if we agree that infrastructure does not provide that amount of value we either need to figure other large scale projects that 1) provide value and 2) requires a lot of manual labor or we need to not found money distribution in work (an alternative could be UBI here).

Well, my city at least (Baltimore) has kind of evolved to "a place where hospitals are", and there's only so much health care you can do over Zoom

And at least Moore is planning to work with Scott in order to expand the public transit footprint Baltimore has (such as more than one light rail/metro line each and more BRT)

and like driving, you often cant scale to meet demand. Both also need replacements after x km.

giant office buildings also have a giant impact. Those resources could have been homes or extra rooms to work from.

then there is the whole fast food and fast everything along the road and various industries that busy themselves with appearance.

We shouldn't forget that only a small portions of jobs are eligible to WFH. How the vast majority of non remote workers will commute to work?

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