<story><title>People work longer and different hours under lockdown</title><url>https://workplaceinsight.net/people-work-longer-and-different-hours-under-lockdown/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brightball</author><text>There’s a big difference between car culture and commuting though.&lt;p&gt;Having a car comes with a great deal of utility and freedom.&lt;p&gt;Commuting is almost entirely driven by city centers and population density that inflates real estate&amp;#x2F;rent costs so high that living out farther and driving in seems to not only make sense, but be the rational choice.&lt;p&gt;Aside from having a sales office in a densely populated area, there’s almost no real value to other functions of a business being located in the middle of a huge city.</text></item><item><author>bredren</author><text>I’m hopeful many people will wake up to the misery that cars and commuting inflicts on themselves.&lt;p&gt;The United States has been consumed with car culture which has bled time and resources from individuals like yourself. But it also is responsible for endless tragedy in the form of accidents and financial overextension.&lt;p&gt;Car culture, partly driven by commuting, has inflated the need for some systems and created entire rent-seeking businesses that could be any number of more useful and interesting investments of human time and capital.&lt;p&gt;I believe a silver lining of the Coronavirus and the actions of political representatives and appointees that have allowed covid to foster will ultimately result in progression in many outdated norms we experienced up through 2020.</text></item><item><author>alyandon</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m technically working longer because I&amp;#x27;m not spending 70-120 additional minutes of each day commuting 14 miles to&amp;#x2F;from the office.  Despite working longer, I still end up having more free time.&lt;p&gt;It is amazing how I manage to rationalize sitting in traffic for that amount of time every day to myself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LordFast</author><text>Yeah, not a fan of sitting in traffic (commuting is actually entirely fine if not for the traffic), but I LOVE my car- it allows me to go anywhere I want whenever I want, and it allows me to make forward progress by leaving the past behind and going somewhere else (physically and metaphorically true).&lt;p&gt;I see all the talk of higher density living without car ownership as primarily driven by corporate interests to keep labor more concentrated and more easily controlled (secondarily driven by cohorts of people who haven&amp;#x27;t experienced anything better than that and therefore wanting to keep status quo), at the expense of quality of life for the average person. The monied interests wouldn&amp;#x27;t care one way or another in lowering this standard of living, but I&amp;#x27;m surprised to see how many ordinary citizens get swept up by the rhetoric.</text></comment>
<story><title>People work longer and different hours under lockdown</title><url>https://workplaceinsight.net/people-work-longer-and-different-hours-under-lockdown/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brightball</author><text>There’s a big difference between car culture and commuting though.&lt;p&gt;Having a car comes with a great deal of utility and freedom.&lt;p&gt;Commuting is almost entirely driven by city centers and population density that inflates real estate&amp;#x2F;rent costs so high that living out farther and driving in seems to not only make sense, but be the rational choice.&lt;p&gt;Aside from having a sales office in a densely populated area, there’s almost no real value to other functions of a business being located in the middle of a huge city.</text></item><item><author>bredren</author><text>I’m hopeful many people will wake up to the misery that cars and commuting inflicts on themselves.&lt;p&gt;The United States has been consumed with car culture which has bled time and resources from individuals like yourself. But it also is responsible for endless tragedy in the form of accidents and financial overextension.&lt;p&gt;Car culture, partly driven by commuting, has inflated the need for some systems and created entire rent-seeking businesses that could be any number of more useful and interesting investments of human time and capital.&lt;p&gt;I believe a silver lining of the Coronavirus and the actions of political representatives and appointees that have allowed covid to foster will ultimately result in progression in many outdated norms we experienced up through 2020.</text></item><item><author>alyandon</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m technically working longer because I&amp;#x27;m not spending 70-120 additional minutes of each day commuting 14 miles to&amp;#x2F;from the office.  Despite working longer, I still end up having more free time.&lt;p&gt;It is amazing how I manage to rationalize sitting in traffic for that amount of time every day to myself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>barcadad</author><text>There is a great deal of research (eg., see Enrico Moretti and Ed Glaeser) that documents that you’re statement isn’t accurate.  There are very strong network effects of educated cities, and unless you believe all future post-COVID network will be over Zoom or Slack (which feels rather dystopian), then post-COVID cities will do just fine.&lt;p&gt;In fact, you could argue that what will suffer is living close to suburban office nodes in order to save commute times.  Even more young people may choose to live in cities if they can avoid the schlep out to their suburban office (think Google bused from SF to Mountain View, but where you only need to take them for big meetings in the office rather than every day).</text></comment>