WFH means I put barely 3000 miles per year on my car. It's absurd we are not aggressively promoting WFH or hybrid WFH at the national level. It's the easiest win for the environment and it's right there for the taking.
That sucks for usability, but I wonder if there exists a market for 'smart insurance' where I can log into a webpage or use an app to put it on or off a car.
But the real answer, I think, is getting a quote for your actual mileage. You're driving 7000 miles a year and being lumped into a risk group with people who are driving two or three times as much:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
Unfortunately, I've found that mileage doesn't have a big impact on my premiums.
If you have a family and still need to drive your kids to school everyday, because schools are too far away to walk and there's no bus (typical in California), if you need to drive to go to the grocery store, if you need to drive to do everything in your life, then working from home in a less dense area might still involve a very similar amount of driving.
Once vehicle miles travelled is subtracted out, the biggest impact from living in less dense areas is deforestation, reduction of large fauna in ecosystems, etc. A classic example of that is the Santa Cruz Mountains, highly populated by low-density living, but getting in and out is so arduous that most people do not commute much, or even leave their houses for much. A good life for hermits, but it's not for everyone.
School may be hard to avoid driving if there's no bus or good walking/biking routes, but maybe you can carpool with neighbors who have kids in the same school.
But I think fundamentally a lot of people are just not accustomed to sitting at home. They feel cooped up, and bored. That's not me -- I'd rarely leave the house if I could get away with it. But I know a lot of people feel that way, if they didn't have to go to work they'd go drive somewhere just to be somewhere different for a while.
I would love nothing more than to live in a walkable neighborhood, with very few cars, that lets kids roam free without fear of them getting killed by drivers. But that's really hard to come by anywhere in the US.
But if you get enough people in one place, you’ll get entrepreneurship.
WFH and H-WFH would be broadly popular among the electorate and could probably take off with just some changes to the tax code.
Presuming everyone does want to live in a dense area (I do not), building housing and infrastructure is expensive and at the end of the day it has to be profitable to build. We don't really have the framework to zone municipalities at the Federal level. So now you are talking about leaving it to the individual states... and I think you can see where that goes.
Given all that, yes, fewer miles driven in aggregate is a good and easy win for the environment. Less gasoline consumed, fewer tires and brake pads consumed, less work clothes bought, less meals purchased at lunch, etc.
I wish we stopped subsidizing wealthy folks choosing to live in low density areas. It is intrinsically regressive that poorer people living in sustainable denser areas are subsidizing the infrastructure of the low density suburbs where richer people live. Low density suburbs do not raise enough taxes to support their own infrastructure, from roads, to water management, to electricity, etc.
Want to live in a single family home? Great! But don't expect people poorer than you to bear the cost.
There's no way you're saying this with a straight face, right? People move out of the city because it's significantly cheaper. Rent in a nice two bedroom "downtown" is $3500. You move 15 minutes out of there and you can get 3 bedroom house for an $1800 mortgage that'll never go up.
Source: I did that. I got tired of paying such a huge chunk of my income for living.
We've gotten more traction building apartment complexes on the edges of the burbs than in the metro area in recent years.
I wouldn't even considering cycling given the speed of cars around there. The local road is used for through traffic despite being one lane in each direction. So it's very frustrating if I want to get somewhere during rush hour, and this is just cars!
If you want to walk to the local gas station, you might have to deal with muddy ground because of the ground being the bottom of a hill in order to get there, although the owner of said muddy ground have filled it in with dirt lately. The sidewalks if they exist, are discontinuous.
Yes, wealthier people live in SFH and the surburb, but it's a questionable in term of quality of life.
I visited the city. In some way, they are more convenient such as access to rideshare scooters and bikes, but also dangerous and automotive centric if less so.
You are painting with too broad of strokes.
It's impossible to build if there are restriction on permitting and construction. Also, I would expect land cost to be a significant factor in high density area due to high demand.
It's absurd that tech people seem to think that WFH is applicable to everyone. I'm in a shop right now and have to touch machinery on a daily basis. So do the rest of the workers.
It's a lot easier to buy a cheap used car than uproot your entire living situation to a new home where you can WFH, which you also might not be able to afford.
Not to mention you probably already own your car for other things like getting groceries.
The current situation is far worse. People are literally trapped in a cycle of poverty or bad work experience because they cannot get to a suburban office park for want of a car.
WFH has lots of limitations. Distribute work geographically and you can lower costs and improve outcomes. Why have accounts payable reps in New Jersey in a giant office when I could rent a small office in Maine or Kentucky for 80% less and pay the workers 30% less, without the complexities of offshoring.
These are called offices.
Look, I WFH and I love it. But in the process I probably quintupled my emissions. I might be able to get that down to quadrupling with an EV and full solar array. But the realities of suburban/rural living are simply much harsher on the environment.
I guess ecological rural living may not be easy if you enjoy lots of social activities. For an introvert like me it wouldn't be a problem.
You’re still consuming massive resources in transporting materials to a low-density location. Unless you’re living completely off the land, de-densifying is far more impactful. (Consider how much land alone would be converted from nature to human use by spreading out the populations of New York and Los Angeles.)
My goal is to get the best candidates. My reasons are selfish - I can get great people cheap if they have circumstances problematic for other employers.
So I got a 5 desks in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and about 15 people in that region utilize it.
Everyone wins: i spend almost nothing. The employee has a great job, doesn’t have to drive 90 minutes, and doesn’t have to disrupt the family life.
What process ? WFH doesn't mean you have to move out of the city and build a huge house with all the modern bells and whistles
It doesn’t, but within the context of this discussion (“distribute geographically”), it does. The logistics of groceries—even exempting my driving to the grocery store versus walking down the street, and despite being physically closer to farms than I was in New York City—practically doubled my emissions alone. Suburban living is massively more impactful than most people realise. There is a reason most of the world lives in either cities or rural destitution.
The misguided vision of late 20th century life and de-industrialization of the US made sustainable communities unsustainable.
Modern governance has created strong incentives for massive, centralized industries. Thats why if you step into a Walmart near my home in upstate New York in October, the shelves are full of apples from Washington picked a year ago.
New York City is a great example of fake sustainability. The financial engineering required to build an operate unnecessary and overbuilt real property has priced out the smaller scale public infrastructure like retail and diners. The landlords can lower rents without their loans being called, and a ton of the older big buildings are vacant and declining.
If people can work and make a living in Binghamton, NY or Scranton, PA, sustainable communities will emerge. Sucking the wealth of the nation to the top 10 metros is to everyone’s disadvantage, as modern society aptly demonstrates.
If we cared we could solve the bulk of problem somewhat easily, the 80/20 rule still applies but you could drastically reduce the number of cars on the road. Of course if all you care about is short term personal convenience and individualism then we're doomed, but if you care just a tiny bit about optimisation, pollution, long term sustainability, well being, the solutions are painfully obvious
I also wonder whether owning a car just 'for groceries' is that commonplace?
EVs don't solve most of these problems. The cars are heavier, hence their tires spread even more micro plastic.
I agree the EVs don't fix everything they are in theory buying us time to make the choices that get rid of cars in the long term.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-26/the-u-s-g...
I doubt the majority of the world population wants to be included in your "we".
the entire basis of society and progress is controlling others for the prosperity of the human race.
Good intentions and all that.
Individual actions can incur communal costs. “Freedom” doesn’t mean “freedom from the consequence of your actions.”
There may be some sort of "compromise" material that could be developed that would lack the toxicity or microplastics issues without compromising safety, but I'm going to defer to experts in that field.
Of course then you'll have a lot of lower-income folks driving around on dangerously worn-out tires because they can't afford new ones.
By the way I thought it was the synthetic rubber tires that lasted longer, but certainly possible that I'm mistaken.
Once the petrochemical supply is exhausted, or what is left is extremely expensive to extract, they won't be able to afford new tires either. (Tires, and personal passenger vehicles, could be some of the least important of the "missing" consumption from the loss of petrochemicals.)
As for the freedom aspect, to get anywhere in an American suburb-styled society you are required to own and maintain a car, a major personal expense. When you travel somewhere, you have to find a place to safely park your car, and your person is tethered to where you park your car, usually needing to return there in a reasonable amount of time the same day, or else paying for long-term parking. You have to have a license from the government to use the only practical source of transportation, and if you don't have that license, you are effectively shut off from any autonomy. Cars certainly do increase the freedom to move and experience the world in some ways, but that is at the cost of other freedoms.
It's also stupidly expensive for most people, and made us develop a car centric approach to a lot of things, a lot of problems it solves are problems we wouldn't have if we designed our cities in other ways
Replacing the current 2b vehicles on earth by electric vehicles will buy us a few years at best but it won't solve the deeper issues
Including the freedom to spend the equivalent of weeks every year stuck in traffic:
https://thecitypaperbogota.com/bogota/bogota-tops-tomtoms-gl...
As long as everyone isn't forced to do it at the same place at the same time.
Driving less goes a long way into making it more amazing.
We've had the answer for longer than we've had cars. Put on the helmet and pedal away!
Your car brain got so excited about driving that it forgot basic grammar.
(It's okay, it happens to me too sometimes).
Your definition of "everyone" excludes children, many seniors, people who can't afford a personal vehicle, and those who can't drive due to disabilities or health conditions. You're also naively ignoring that just the infrastructure needed to support cars on its own often greatly impinges on these groups' freedom of movement.
Cars are best for the stuff they show on the commercials; driving to the weekend cabin, hauling a thing, impressing a date, going on the family trip.
So yeah, keep the driving, but for the one-off things where they are great at. That's really the only time when a car represents freedom. They are not freedom when it's the only option to get a loaf of bread or get to your office.