this still smells of propaganda, like it’s woven through the whole thing. “The American worker is making peace with a longer ride”.
and yet the very first example they provide is someone who works from home twice a week.I’ll tell you this: the commute is even better when you work from home. WFH means less carbon emissions, less time wasted in traffic, and less time literally putting your life at risk from vehicle collisions.
As someone that loves going into an office, I wish they let people who didn’t stay at home.
I miss the aspect of the pandemic where people were freer to stay home if they chose, and the roads were so much emptier. It’s better for people to work how they’d like to, it’s better for me trying not to spend an hour commuting, and it’s better for the Earth to have fewer people burning carbon twice a day.
I almost got into a pileup on the way to work this morning. I hate commuting
Same! Dickhead cut off a truck hauling gravel, forcing truck to evade, nearly running me off the road onto a sidewalk with several people on it.
Glad it was only nearly!
Got cut off by a BMW today. I know this might be shocking but the driver didn’t have their turn signal on.
WFH means less carbon emissions, less time wasted in traffic, and less time literally putting your life at risk from vehicle collisions.
It speaks volumes that all of these problems are car-related. The whole push for WFH is a massive condemnation of how badly people actually feel about the effects of the car-oriented development that the U.S has been spending so much time championing.
Even if I lived across the street from my office, I would still prefer to work from my home.
a) what you say is true b) these car-related issues affect other countries just as much : I’m Canadian. c) there are other things that WFH improves as well, but they are far enough behind the car-related problems that they can seem petty by comparison. They aren’t petty at all, but they do make a convenient foil for those who argue against WFH.
Hey! That sounds like pure communism! You go to work where the overseer can keep an eye on you and your productivity!
my overseer can see my work just fine. also I fucking rock.
deleted by creator
Trains, bitches - and WFH for people who have no business being in an office.
Lol I have no reason to be in the office for my job. My company started forcing people back in January. I take the train in. It takes me 2.5 one way, 5 hours total. Doesn’t make any fucking sense that I have to make the journey, and it makes no fucking sense that the train ride takes an hour and 45 minutes
deleted by creator
Not to mention it’s just exhausting spending 5 hours of your day in commute
That’s about 15 hours a week I could use to work and to go out with my dog, work out, actually do work more efficiently with two screens, and just idk spend some time with friends
Do you only work 3 days a week or are you subtracting your hour long fault commutes?
OP spend over one full day a week commuting. Gag worthy
I work 5 days a week but have to go in 3 now so just counted those
The other two I still wfh
I’d just not go in at that point.
If there only were trains, or trams, or busses. In many areas, public transport consists of “the morning bus” and “the afternoon bus”.
And not everyone can WFH. Actually, most people with lower pay grades can’t, so they still have to be present whereever they work.
And while we’re at it, everyone gets a pony.
I’d love more trains and I’d love more WFH jobs, but that’s not the reality in 2024 and just declaring “trains, bitches” is not helpful or particularly cordial to all of the people who have no choice but to make long commutes to their jobs.
I would wager most people don’t actually have no choice but to make a massive commute. Often it just comes down to policy choices. As a country, we’ve made deliberate decisions to ignore developing mass transit, just as we’ve decided homes should be treated as investment vehicles. If we built out and maintained more trains, buses and light rail, congestion could be cut down and more people could travel much more rapidly and efficiently. If we didn’t obsess over the idea that property values must go up without fail and encouraged building affordable housing, people could actually afford to live closer to where they work, rather than being pushed ever farther into the suburbs and countryside in search of a place they could afford to live in. Some people make insane commutes chasing higher pay in a neighboring region. I knew of people at one company who commuted from Philadelphia to Brooklyn every day, because NYC pay was higher and Philly rents lower. That said, that’s absolutely a conscious choice those people make.
Likewise, not every job is capable of being done from home, but many are, yet workers are still forced to come into the office anyway. This is a choice by company execs, not an inevitable fact of life.
I’m sure there are some jobs that are relatively remote, yet need to be done in person despite the long commutes. Let the people doing them be compensated accordingly, but this is absolutely not something that should be normalized for the population at large.
As a country, we’ve made deliberate decisions to ignore developing mass transit,
But as an individual, I need to have an income, and I need a place to live that my income will support sustainably.
I don’t get a say in where the affordable homes are in relation to where my work needs to be done. And I don’t get a say in the transportation infrastructure between those locations.
Ah yes, “find a cheaper place to live or get another job.” What a ‘choice’ you’re saying people have.
Individually, no, but this is the decision people have been making in aggregate for decades with the people they vote into government to represent them. You can still see it happening when people oppose any attempts to build out public transportation when they believe it would either personally bother them in some way, or give poor people an easier way to access their communities.
Heck, you saw it earlier this year where municipalities around NY have fought and ignored the mandate to build up more dense housing, or the congestion pricing being walked back now. Housing costs being unaffordable is a serious issue when it impacts them or their acquaintances, but that’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make if it keeps poor people and minorities from also being able to afford to live in their town. Something needs to be done about traffic and air quality in Manhattan, right up until it means they would either need to pay up or take the train.
The governor is taking most of the heat for these policies, bud meanwhile, people keep reelecting the same local and state officials that aggravate the problems that the public is chronically complaining of. They’ll shoot themselves in the foot if it means they can hurt others too.
This still sounds like victim blaming to me. It should be the job of the opposition to these candidates to educate the public about what they’re voting for. Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.
I would have more sympathy for them if these were new issues, but they’ve been perennial problems for more than three decades at this point. There comes a point where it’s either willful ignorance, or being so woefully stupid you probably ought to be declared a ward of the state and get a minder to make sure you don’t get caught off guard by your own saliva and drown in it.
Like, it’s utterly stupid on its face. If you have the right to vote, you’re struggling to afford to keep a roof over your head, yet you keep voting for the politicians who block the very affordable housing that your continued ability to live in your community depends on because it’ll let the “wrong kind of people” move in, or “dilute the character of the neighborhood” and bring down property values, yet you cannot understand how this is voting against your own interests without someone breaking it down for you, you make a very compelling case for the shortcoming of democracy with universal suffrage. Even then, these are topics that have been gone over to death
Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.
Emphasis mine, but the public has been told over, and over, and over again. At what point does it stop being everyone else’s responsibility that they just don’t want to hear it, or are willing to ignore it if it hurts someone else?
Told over and over again by whom? Who is telling them? Where are they telling them?
wfh for people who have no business being in an office
I don’t belong in an office but it’s kinda hard to mop the floors where I work from home. 😭
Sounds like an engineering problem to me
but it’s kinda hard to mop the floors where I work from home.
Yeah, the “everyone should work from home” factions seems to forget those of us whose work requires us being able to touch the things we’re working on.
Same in Canada, and I have not moved, I live ~12 miles (~20km) of my working place, 90% highway. Early 2000s it took 30 minutes or less, early 10s ~40 minutes, 2019 before pandemic it was already a good 45+ minutes. 2023+ it is more than one hour (forth, and 1h back).
So you’re passively looking for work every day, right? You’re not gonna keep doing an additional 10hr shift a week unpaid, right?
I WFH since COVID, best thing ever and only 8h work per day 🙂
Mine has been creeping up as well. More construction and more traffic.
I worked in Manhattan and had coworkers who lived in Pennsylvania. Two hours each way. A story I heard was that a bus company recruited drivers who would get up at 4am, pick up passengers, drive to the city, and then go to another job. 6 pm they get in the bush and drive home.
That doesn’t make much sense. What happened to the bus in the middle of the day?
Parking in Downtown Manhattan can be rented out for $30 - $50 per hour, maybe $80 all day. And that’s a car-sized space. Since a bus is two or three of those, it would make no sense to just waste $240+ on an unused bus.
Before Hudson Yards went up that space was mostly empty. I’ve also seen lines of buses parked under the FDR downtown.
I have a horrendous 2 min drive to work each day. #fuckcities
If it’s two minutes do you need to be driving? That seems like a walk or bike
Well I wasn’t counting dropping kids off at school or daycare, which is the opposite direction. I often walk.
I drop off kids and pick them up every day. By bike. There’s really no excuse for driving in a city.
I mean there are plenty of reasons. Some seasons it rains everyday here. Get off your high bike.
I bike every day, rain or snow. It gets to -20C in Montreal during the winter. You just need to dress right.
Ok but you said “there’s no excuse for driving in a city”. There are a million excuses. You’re obviously not disabled, but many people are. You’re obviously younger, but many people are older. You are obviously okay with the cold. Many people are not.
Why don’t you try imagining biking to work in 50°C heat, with a bad knee and a migraine? Plus asthma or anxiety, your choice. Also, put your kid and some groceries on the bike and see how easy it is.
It’s a figure of speech. Obviously if you have a physical disability or a mental block that is hard to overcome, I don’t fault them for it.
However if they are able but choose to be stuck in traffic instead while I zip by with my children singing in the chariot, that’s on them.
OP was saying they have a horrible two minute drive to their work while they also have a walk into the opposite direction for their kid. Sounds like they can do it.
All the illegals coming in aren’t helping things either
I hope immigrants sneak in and move your house a few inches further from your work every day
That explains the noises at night! If they could just shore up our one sagging foundation corner in the back while they’re at it, that’d be great. After they do some serious manual labor in the summer sun for me, then they can go back to their country until I need more work done. Oh! Actually, no, we need them to do the harvest. And there’s this thing with some construction… shit. It turns out that hard workers are actually really needed everywhere and we shouldn’t be such xenophobic/racist assholes all the time.
I do actually need the foundation looked at, though but I can’t afford it despite having a pretty decent and high experience required job. All the money is going to billionaires instead. Strange that those same billionaires are funding lots of media telling me to be afraid of people all the time… no relation to the whole immigration thing, I’m sure.
Just because we want people to come into our country legally and want to know their background doesn’t make us racist.
You don’t have to be racist to be ridiculous.
and want to know their background
How much background checking do you think they do on someone from France vs. someone from Libya? Do you think it’s an equal amount? (It is not.) Do you want it to be an equal amount?
Yeah, I do, and obviously it’s not the same now. These people are coming in by the millions and they’re not doing background checks at all. They’re doing background checks on the ones that are waiting to get here legally.
“These people” being the non-white ones.
If there are white people crossing the Southern border illegally it includes them to since you want to make everything about race although I don’t see any white people crossing the Southern border
That’s the kind of thing a racist would say
Are these illegals with us now? Do they ever tell you to do things, things that might hurt people?
What are you talking about?
Ask Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan to explain it to you.
Andrew Tate? You sure you’re replying to the right person? Dude, I think you’re getting your messages mixed up or something
