[ajuc]

> One paper published in 2010 found that absenteeism among German workers would be 15-20% lower if they did not commute. If it were somehow possible to scrap commuting altogether, the British economy would see a productivity boost worth £12 billion a year, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a think-tank.

Allowing occasional working from home has the same effects, and require no investment in infrastructure.

> But it is not just housing markets that hold back productivity. According to one study, employment in the Bay Area around San Francisco would be about five times larger than it is but for tight regulation on construction of all types.

I'm not familiar with Bay Area, but in Poland people constantly complain about overregulation of construction, and we have much less restrictive construction law than in western Europe (and it shows - public space in Poland is awful compared to Czech Republic or Germany).

You can have too loose construction law, and the result is a city centre were nobody lives - people just commute to work and back. This results in suburbia, and longer commute times - the direct opposite of the effect they wanted to achieve with the first point in that article.

[sillygeese]

> You can have too loose construction law, and the result is a city centre were nobody lives - people just commute to work and back.

It's not that Poland (or any other country) needs more laws. It's a problem of incentives, or lack thereof.

If a construction company has bribed politicians to keep giving them lucrative gigs on other people's money, they will have no incentive to actually do a good job.

If, on the other hand, there were free competition among construction companies, they would all strive to do their best so that they would be awarded more gigs in the future.

It's as simple as "corruption", but that's a misnomer because that's just the system working as intended. What's the point of being a city official if you're not in a position to get bribes one way or another?

With great power comes great.. opportunities for collecting bribes!

[ajuc]

I don't think the corruption is the main problem here. Nobody pays bribes to paint their commie block in fuchsia-green stripes (it's a thing here, I guess because of 50 years of shades of gray everywhere). Or to put 20-meter tall billboard on their small plot in front of XIII-th century castle. Or to build "Mountainer style one-family-house" between 16th century tenament houses. With huge brick wall all over it, and billboards on every square meter of the wall. It's chaos.

It's just that after communism people consider all regulation "communist-like restriction of God-given freedom".

It changes slowly for last few years, but '90s and '00s were awful.

[sillygeese]

You seem to be describing the results of shitty construction companies getting gigs even though they produce shitty, "chaotic" results. But you somehow don't think it's because of "corruption" anyway?

Do you think you need a law that says "construction companies must build sturdy, reliable, good-looking buildings in good taste, or else!" .. ?

Do you think everything would be fine then?

[ajuc]

> You seem to be describing the results of shitty construction companies getting gigs even though they produce shitty, "chaotic" results.

My examples were of people building or "upgrading" their houses by themselves and covering them in billboards. No developer or corruption needed. They have the right to do that - it pays (or it satisfies their needs) so they do that. Externalities be damned.

Sure, there is some corruption, but that's irrelvant, if there was law forbidding building malls with huge parking lots in a historic center there would be no malls and parking lots there, no matter the amount of corruption. Law isn't outright broken, just the corner cases are abused, and law covers very little of what it should.

> Do you think you need a law that says "construction companies must build sturdy, reliable, good-looking buildings in good taste, or else!" .. ?

There is no problem with "sturdiness". It's in the law, and people obey. The winter/summer cycle here ensures people don't skimp on good quality.

I think there should be law specifying which kind of buildings should be build in which region. Incliding details like "which kind of roof", "how high", etc. There's nothing wrong with one-family housing, but the kind of fence you can use should be specified. Otherways people build 3-meters-high solid walls to have village in the midle of city.

There should be ban on huge billboards in the city center. It's not some evil corporations donig it, it's small few-person or family companies. They are engaged in spiraling war for attention, covering cities with bigger and bigger ads. It's out of control, like banners on early '00s internet. And there's no adblock for brain.

[sillygeese]

> Sure, there is some corruption, but that's irrelevant [..] Law isn't outright broken, just the corner cases are abused, and law covers very little of what it should.

How could it possibly be irrelevant? We're talking about countless millions of dollars (over time) of other people's money being used here. Why would anyone work hard to get himself into a position to decide who gets it, if there was nothing in it for him?

You want more regulation, but what exactly do you want the laws to say? If there's no problem with quality, what is the problem?

If the problem is just that you personally don't like X, Y and Z, then there is no real problem.

[ajuc]

> Why would anyone work hard to get himself into a position to decide who gets it, if there was nothing in it for him?

Well if you like to believe EVERYBODY in local administration is corrupted - your choice. I don't think so. Just like I don't think every programmer that writes software for banks - plants logic bombs and backdoors.

> If there's no problem with quality, what is the problem?

There is a problem with esthethic. I think I was clear about that. There is a problem with prioritising cars over everything else. Parking lots and 3-lane roads dividing city into small non-walkable parts. People escaping to suburbs. Growing traffic jams and growing commute times caused by that.

Quality isn't a problem, because there are strict laws about it. And it's quite easy to control. And people don't like to live in houses that can fall apart, or that are badly insulated, when it can be -20 C in winter and +35 C in summer.

On the other hand they have no issues with living in ugly city, designed as a drive-through. Or if they do - they react by escaping to suburbs, not by improving the city.

I don't know what the laws should be exactly, but I know it can be done, because Czechs and Germans did it much better than we.

[jon-wood]

> If it were somehow possible to scrap commuting altogether.

Indeed. If only there were a way that people could do work without travelling to a specific desk in a specific building during specific hours.

[Gys]

The problem is actually in the time and boredom while traveling. So maybe autonomous cars, workplaces in trains or (far fetched ;-) teleportation could improve the 'commuting-problem'.

I think most people still like to work physically with other people. That is why I go to a co-worker space. Because I am actually more productive at home.

[TeMPOraL]

Boredom while traveling is something that could be solved for most, but it goes against the will of people and various cost-cutting solutions. You could get rid of cars in the big cities and replace them with more public transportation. But people won't willingly give up their cars because of various - often not very rational - reasons, and the public transportation is being developed in the wrong way too. Someone figured out the cheapest way to increase the capacity is to replace sitting places with standing places, and so each new generation of buses and trams has less space to sit down. To get rid of boredom in commute, you need the opposite - have much more sitting spaces, so that commuters can read books comfortably or work on their computers.

[dasmoth]

Not so very long ago, there seemed to be a movement in quite the opposite direction: live somewhere car-friendly and work on out-of-town campuses with ample parking.

While I'm another one who believes that the ideal commute is "step across the hallway" (or perhaps an office at the bottom of the garden...), I'd argue that the old low-density promise of commuting 20 or 30 minutes on open roads isn't so bad (and certainly no more taxing than what the public transport/new-urbanist lobby seem to be proposing). Why is this never on the agenda any more?

[TeMPOraL]

I don't know why there's such "new-urbanist lobby" in the US, but in Europe you can't realize the dream of "open-road commuting" and low-density employment, not without turning the entire continent into one big suburbia. I don't think we have enough land for that.

I'm personally for public transit because of efficiency. Even if you could somehow get that "old low-density promise of commuting 20 or 30 minutes on open road", which would definitely be not a bad situation for commuting, it would still be an energy disaster. Mass transportation and high-density settlements are much more energy-efficient, and energy is one of the biggest problems we're facing as a civilization right now.

[dasmoth]

The UK has 26.7M households in 243,610km^2. That's nearly a hectare per household -- doesn't sound "suburban" to me (although maybe some parts of the US would disagree!).

Of course, the UK population is very unevenly distributed at the moment...

[Gys]

Yes, individuals optimize traveling focused on cost (less space = cheaper) so they get what they want. Whereas society and employers would like to see higher output. If only 'they' were willing to pay for that.

Personal happiness is mostly a long term goal which does not go well with short term needs.

[mooreds]

This sentence jumped out at me too. Of course, not all jobs are amenable to remote work, but many are. However, it will take a long time to change the expectations of managers and coworkers to reflect this new reality.

[TeMPOraL]

> in Poland people constantly complain about overregulation of construction

In Poland people constantly complain about overregulation of pretty much everything (I'd say complaining itself is our national sport, but that's another topic) - but that's probably typical of humans. It's easy to complain about overregulation when the government tells you you can't do whatever you want and dump externalities on everyone around you.

But I agree with your conclusion. We have quite lax construction laws and people still commute. I don't really see how the two are actually related in practice. Majority of people doesn't get to pick and choose jobs. You can spend months looking for a good opening, and if you don't like one because it's on the other side of the city, then no worries, there are thousands of people who will happily take your place.

[ajuc]

IMHO making it easier, cheaper, and less risky to rent flats is the low-hanging fruit.

You can't predict where you will work in 10 years, why expect to live in the same house for 10 years? Of course - not wanting to move kids to a different school is valid reason, but still kids change school every few years. Many people could reduce commute with no bad side-effects, if not for the problems with renting flats.

People are very careful about renting flats to families with kids, because it's very hard to expel them if they stop paying right now.

[s_kilk]

>> If it were somehow possible to scrap commuting altogether...

I'm about to start a remote job, and this is the bit I'm most looking forward to. I'll be able to claw back that 2 hours I'm losing every day to a pointless commute.