Hacker News Reader

Comment by newspaper1 | Hacker News Reader

If you have a college degree, you might be able to work from home and not take your life in your hands twice a day on a freeway of death. If you don't have a college degree, you probably have to commute. If you live in a rural area you probably have to commute long distances, with low lighting on potentially icy and twisty single lane roads with oncoming traffic. In all the discussions of RTO vs WFH you almost never see safety mentioned, but it's an incredible upside to not having to drive to and from work every day.

View on HN

Not that America's car culture isn't a dangerous problem, but I'm pretty sure highway deaths don't explain this...

There is also the added stress of commuting, which its fair to assume has negative impacts on heart, cognitive, etc. health.

Stress, risk, and stress compounding risk. So many people speed recklessly after having been stuck in traffic.

I would, however, not strongly link WFH to college and RTO to non-college. Many companies (as well as governments) have implemented RTO. The key outlier for WFH seems to be contracts and/or good negotiation skills.

Agreed (without regard to applicability of this article) - I was hit twice (i.e. other cars running into mine, their fault) within a calendar year after 5 day RTO went into effect in mid 2024 at work here (the valley).

I don't buy it. Road fatalities are probably the single easiest hypothesis to isolate. You can't put a label on a cancer or heart attack death, but you sure can for trauma deaths.

Coroners will almost never classify death by motor vehicle or aircraft collision or impact as suicide.

What percent of work from homers actually avoid the highway of death? Sure there are some living an urban car free lifestyle working from home, but plenty chose the opposite for their remote work, choosing space and inconvenience from job centers which in America inevitably means car centric exurban or rural living. I'd wager you are more at risk driving 5 miles for groceries on one of those single lane per direction 50mph rural roads than you are commuting in rush hour traffic at 16mph.

I went from 5 days a week or 2 hours per day behind the wheel to essentially nothing, maybe I drove once a week, maybe

Your wager is nonsense by the way.

I'm not so sure it is nonsense. Those rural 50mph roads are generally considered the most dangerous road type and many states prioritize turning them into actual divided roads due to prevalence of fatal accidents. Admittedly the rush hour traffic experience depends a lot on where you live; in the midwest you probably only see congestion on the exit itself and are otherwise going the full 60mph on even urban freeways, whereas in places like LA or NYC you aren't breaking a 16mph average no matter what road you are on during rush hour. Not a lot of ways to die going 16mph...

I'd love to see some actual data, but I'd bet that a large majority of pandemic WFH moves were to midrange CoL suburb sorts of areas that have reasonable job prospects within reach, so should push come to shove and they need to find local butt-in-seat employment they can. Major hospitals, airports, etc being reasonable to access is a big draw too.

That's what I did. Groceries are a 10m drive away on a bad day. I've lived the rural life and it's not glamorous so I have no desire to return.

Of course some did make the move out to places like you're mentioning, but my suspicion is that this group is actually not that large and the big splash they made in media (traditional and social) made their numbers seem greater than they are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com