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Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

Eliminating the daily commute for those who have jobs where in person presence isn't essential beats all other forms of transportation. But activists, cities, and greenwash companies have all shown their true face, each for their own reasons of self-interest.

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This is part of it, but people still need to leave their house sometime, and the best solution is one where people can survive without needing to own a car at all, which is nearly impossible in most of the US. We sold our nation's soul to cars, and now we're fighting to get it back.

Yet the commute is a full ten trips a week you can eliminate. People aren’t running errands 10x a week. The clear roads and clear skies early in the pandemic showed us what this would look like if more people worked remotely.

Note that I'm not against remote work, rather I'm all for it. But programmers like us here on HN are prone to tunnel vision on this topic: most people cannot bring their work home. Nurses, lab techs, construction workers, factory workers, plumbers, electricians, all these people still need to commute, and so we need to design our cities accordingly.

Programmers aren't the only people who have work compatible with working remotely. My post explicitly was restricted to those whose jobs can be done remotely and laments that there are other forces at play that interfere with this ability. Most of those force like to bath themselves in greenwash. There's no need for any improvement to work for 100% of humanity for it to be an improvement. Stopping the good because it's not the perfect just stops anything good from happening.

I take you don't have kids to take to school and you get all your groceries delivered to your door by someone on an e-bike?

The groceries can be delivered by car or van efficiently, as the same delivery person can also serve other people along the way (as opposed to everybody going to get their groceries with their car indepedently and polluting 10x).

Or you know, have supermarkets and grocery stores in walking distance.

As for the kids, there is such a thing as a school bus...

I take it you didn't bother to read the words commute and job, which implies travel to a workplace to conduct work. While you can combine a commute with a trip to buy groceries, if it happens to be on the way, and drop off/pick up kids at school, if it is on the way and the schedule works out that way, for most that's simply not reality. Note that my post said nothing about giving up one's vehicles, it only mentioned commuting trips for work. Don't add things to comments that aren't there.

My point is that "remote work" is orthogonal to car dependency, so why are you bringing this up?

I am all for remote work, but even if I had to be commuting to work, I'd be doing by taking the bike, bus or train like I've done my entire life.

taking kids to school is actually the reason we just caved and bought a cargo bike, which we're gonna add e-assist to.

For a great many people in urban centres, the school run is the most egregiously frustrating car journey and the one most attractive to eliminate

I bike to work and don't mind my commute. I have to be in the office but even if I don't have in person (lab) work that day I still come in since the rest of the team is here. As long as you don't have a terrible office culture (I haven't had this experience in my career) or a long car commute its not so bad. I have done a longer car commute and it sucks.

I'd like to see the numbers in the full accounting, ie, how much carbon cost is added with Slack calls and the like. Somehow I think (analog) biking to the office wins over fully remote especially if you have video on for more than one hour per day.

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