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Comment by benrbray | Hacker News Reader

> Remote work has given me almost two more hours of life a day (that I'd otherwise spend commuting)

I get this sentiment, but I want to stress to people who feel this way that long commutes are not a problem with our work culture, they are a problem with our car culture.

Instead of retreating to our homes in the suburbs, people should be demanding more compact cities with expansive public transportation. Instead of losing our "second place", let's fight to get our "third place" back!

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Public transit and compact cities is not the awesome solution people make it to be. (I live in Europe)

Usually the commute time is longer because of trips to the station + waiting for the vehicle to come. Even worse people typically all go to work at the same time and rush hours form. No breathing room. Usually never being able to sit. It is horrible always and even more so during pandemics. Having exclusive seats at the vehicle and preordained vehicles vetted by the company. That works but only large companies can afford this. Also public transit only works in large cities.

Compact cities with houses are good. The cities in Netherlands are a really good way to model every society in the world. Everything in your neighbourhood just a 5 minute bike ride away. Everything else should be done remotely if possible.

Agreed. I live in Hong Kong which has arguably some of the best public transport in the world - which is great until you are out of a service area of the MTR, then it's undersized packed busses mixed with convoluted bus routes - which even without the heavy road traffic leave you feeling exhausted.

Doing the same commute by car has been a significant quality of life improvement - not least because I have a few square feet to myself while I'm in transit!

I used to travel with public transport to work. More than happy to not do it for 2 hours a day.

I don't know why 2 hours of public transport is better than 2 hours of commute by car? It's still time wasted.

Personally I would prefer 2 hours on a train to 2 hours by car, since I can read or reply to emails without focusing on the road.

But the idea of density is that everything is closer together, so transit time is less, and you have more modes of transportation available to you, reducing congestion. In the United States, most people don't have the option of a short commute or to live within walking/biking distance of work even if they wanted to.

The grass is always greener on the other side. It is quite difficult to read or reply to emails when you literally have to squeeze your body in a subway train.

I moved to Tokyo after vowing never to live in car-dependent hell again. I can say with certainty that the grass is greener on this side, at least when it comes to transportation!

Having control of a car is much better than the hell that is being a public transportation prisoner.

Cities with public transit still have roads, if that's what you prefer. More people on trains means less people on the roads, which is better for everyone. I think people should have free choice over what mode of transport they use, but in America right now the only option is: car.

At my work the people who moved far away to own a bigger house enjoy WFH - they have more space to isolate themselves during the working day, and a long commute they can skip.

I have a short cycle into work which is one of the highlights of my day and hate WFH.

It's probably easier to arrange remote work than to wait for our cities to be rebuilt.

Wouldn't public transit still take up quite a bit of time if you don't live near your office?

For one, everything would be closer together, which helps reduce transit time. Advocates of density and public transit also usually advocate for mixed-use zoning, which would make it much easier to live near within walking or biking distance of where you work. So with good city planning, you could drastically reduce the time spent commuting.

Even with a commute, riding a bus or train is much less stressful than commuting by car. You can read a book, reply to emails, etc..

This is probably another symptom of differing psychologies and preferences, but “density” and “everything closer together” sounds like a description of hell.

I’ve been to NYC, SF, Seattle… all that closeness (I called it cramped and stifling) was not something I would want to experience long term.

There is something in between NYC and an American-style suburb. I encourage you to take a look at Not Just Bikes [1,2]:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ

Like the Seattle area, or the SF bay? Those aren't any better, frankly. Too many people packed into small spaces. Even the precisely manicured green spaces get packed full of people, ironically looking to escape.

Seattle / SF are both still very car-centric and have pretty bad public transit. Unfortunately I don't know of any places in the United States that are representative of what I'm talking about, outside some small pockets which don't span more than a few blocks. Largely due to zoning restrictions.

Not Just Bikes has some good video of places in the Netherlands and elsewhere that come close to meeting the ideal. Take a look too at maps of small/medium towns in Germany or Japan compared to USA.

Cable cars, trams, busses, trains, taxis – if SF and Seattle have poor public transit, I've never seen a place which does then. And I say this as someone who lived in and extensively used said public transit in both cities.

Let's hypothesize about a utopian city where a person's housing is, at a maximum, a quarter hour walk/bike from their job at Apple. The moment that person switches jobs to Google, however, they have to choose between moving or losing every benefit the utopian city layout has provided. Worse, their new commute would be explicitly working against the design of this hypothetical city.

Workforces should not be (and are not with suburbs) tightly integrated into where they work. This is something important to consider. You can't have the same density of employers that you have today if you're also packing in the other services (residential, markets, drug stores, laundrymats, etc).

I actually live in Europe, so cars aren't my problem, as I already use public transportation. My commute is caused by the stupidly high rents in any area close to the center of my city - which hopefully is another problem that can be partially solved by remote work, since it could ease the demand and lower the prices a bit when fewer big earners need to live crammed in the same area.

More compact cities mean less living space.

Not necessarily. Urban/suburban spaces today are dominated by parking lots and four-to-six-lane roads. Eliminating those would make cities more compact without sacrificing size. With everything closer together, you wouldn't need the parking spaces in the first place!

Of course, I also don't think it would be a bad thing to stop building McMansions. Many consider Tokyo to be an extreme example of density, but even there it is quite common to find 80-160sqm detached houses. At half of Tokyo's density, people wouldn't even need to give up their yards.

People still commute an hour or more (using a lot of public transport) in large-ish European cities because there simply isn't enough housing in the cities (and through some kind of bacterial growth law, there will never be enough in the city) and what is there is of course extremely expensive. Naturally many people live in suburbian-ish things.

This.

I live and work in Paris proper, which is a very dense city. Transit sucks, my commute is around 45 minutes each way. Bonus points for when I have to take it in rush hour, with people pressed together and no air conditioning. Extra bonus points for the habitual breakdowns, meaning even more people per train.

Also, high density with "historic city" means very small apartments and very high prices. I really don't know how much better this is compared to US-style suburbia. Oh, we don't have clean air either, all the highways and city roads are congested, too.

This is just poor planning, no? I never said it's not possible to design cities badly. Look to Tokyo for an example of density and transit working really well.

True, but I think that more importantly it shows that it's not "easy", since cities that work well seem to be in the minority.

Plus, I'd say European cities, in particular, aren't really "designed", seeing how they have to contend with historic centers they can't touch, etc.

But I think that, more importantly, we should try to avoid having to be all in the same spot if it's not necessary.

Yes, there are some advantages to scale, and some things are easier / cheaper to do when you have 1M people in the same space as opposed to spread far and wide. But this also produces other issues, such as stressed people because of all the noise (not just cars, but neighbors, etc.)

I want to stress that cities are the problem.

Instead of being forced to trek into cities, people should be demanding to be able to work from any other place.

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