[another-dave]

> By working from home, people aren't paying for public transport or eating out at restaurants near their places of work, while expensive offices remain virtually empty.

If there's a large-scale shift to working from home, I'd imagine you'd see an eventual rebalancing of cities & suburbans in both directions:

— more cafés and restaurants in suburban commuter towns or residential areas that were previously ghost towns during the day. (Personally, if there were more cafés and restaurants around my home (and we weren't in the middle of a lockdown) I'd be happy to frequent those while WFH to get out of the house & as a change of scene.)

— if offices do end up vacant longer-term, a conversion of some of this 'down town' space to residential.

In the interim, you'd probably want to support people and businesses along the way, but I don't think introducing taxes to chivvy people back to the existing (old?) status quo is the way forward out of all this. This could be an opportunity to make city centres a lot more livable.

On the issue of public transport — at least here in London, the network was struggling for funding even before the pandemic nevermind now. I think it's time to bite the bullet and make public transport free at the point of use — I'd happily pay an extra tax for that and would go some way to reducing day-to-day expenditure of people who depend on it most. Plus (again, when we're back to normal), it may encourage more people to reduce single-passenger car use if they're already paying for the train/bus.