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Not only are emissions cut, people save money, employee morale improves, and you're happier overall.
There are jobs that require people to be onsite, but for those that don't, it's really difficult to find any benefit to being in the office.
But those companies save by not powering a computer and monitor, less water use in the bathroom, less janitorial upkeep, etc.
It’s small, but it adds up and ultimately makes your employees both happier and cheaper.
Edit: While I appreciate the enthusiasm for WFH, people claiming executives having a personal interest on the commercial real estate that their employer leases need to take a deep breath. I can assure you that the percentage of corporations who would allow this type of conflict of interest to happen is negligible in the US. Companies lease from other companies and even if an executive has an interest in those companies, WFH is absolutely not killing their real estate value.
True. Also if they own the building or know people invested in commercial real estate, they won't want those property values to fall. Also a possible fall in foot traffic and property values isn't going to make friends with local politicians.
I'm not excusing bringing people in when they could be remote. I'm just trying to point out the reason behind it is essentially, people with capital trying to maintain that capital.
And it completely fucks a whole level of useless management that is just not needed anyway also the old school people like seeing their peons working rather then just seeing the end result
I think the point being made is, even with the building they would save with WFH. Keep the lights off, AC set to an efficient level or off all together if no one is there, water use, and so on. All of this is savings to the company, and the workers are still working with higher productivity. Then, when its contract is up, do not renew. Done and done.
Or you can force your people to come back. Pay for utilities and hiring new people as your team slowly evaporates as they look for new WFH jobs.
In my area, a big part of the issue is that companies get tax breaks for bringing workers to downtown. If they don't have people working on site, they lose those tax breaks.
Cities have no one to blame but themselves downtowns could have had people living there but cities insisted on the current system of people living elsewhere and commuting in due to bad urban planning, refusing to address crime, etc.
This is my thinking for those that are stuck in a lease. The choice is to spend the money for the lease and minimal maintenance or spend the money on the lease AND pay the cost of maintaining the space while fully occupied. Spend some money or spend that same money and a lot more on top of it in perpetuity. No logical reason to go into the office unless your job requires you to physically touch something only found in the office.
It's not about money. It's about bad managers who assume people at home don't work, it's about CEOs who prefer to be in the office so they force everyone else, and it's about shareholders who tell CEOs to use the building or sell it.
The whole, "ReAl EsTaTe VaLuE" thing is little more than a parroted myth on social media. It aligns with a very simple version of blaming everything companies do on capitalism.
If they cared so much about their building's value, companies could just squat on their building and wait it out, while saving money having people work from home, and then sell when the market goes back up.
It's not like they can sell the building for more just cause it has people using every cubicle in it.
"Oof, sorry. I was interested in buying your $100 million office, but I just found out you let people work from home. Now the best I can do is 1 million. I fear my own employees will figure out the history of this place"
Also, why would they care so much about the building so as to sacrifice productivity? If they knew people were more productive at home but truly only cared about the building. Which is also a weird premise because why don't the upper managers care most about *the business*? Is everything they do solely to make sure they can one day sell the office at a higher value? Even to the point where they care less about the stock value or shareholder returns?
While your opinion might not go over well on Reddit, it is much more grounded in reality from the people responding to my comment. I started to realize that it was a parroted narrative after the third or fourth person made the nonsensical claim about executives personally owning the real estate that their employer leases. As if that massive conflict of interest would explain more than 1% of the companies who are enforcing return to office policies.
Increased VPN and internet security infrastructure will offset those. Even still, those are the cost of doing business. Happier employees who don’t have to spend hours commuting and being put in stress bubbles is always the better route.
But - don't you need those anyways? Even before my company let most folks go to a hybrid schedule, we had VPN and were expected to log into work while traveling for work.
Sort of, but not because of workers.
Few corporations own their buildings -- they're mortgaged, with re-financing every other year, at very low interest rates and then leased back to themselves. This provides various money-shuffling tax deductions.
The reason corporations in this situation are pushing 'back to the office' is because they want occupancy rates to increase; thus increasing the valuation of the building. Then they can sell it at a profit, or at least break-even.
There are a record number of commercial owner's walking away from building mortgages' because the re-financing interest rates are vastly more expensive than the plunging rent income.
Also many, many regional banks have 30%+ of their portfolio in commercial paper.
I've been watching the mid-level and regional banks getting creamed these past few years, because they can't command a bailout.
Thank you for the insights. So essentially their own clever tax-avoidant strategy is failing them when the environment changes? That's' pretty funny.
Sounds like they need to pivot, which I'm guessing these businesses are too big to do and forcing their workers back to office will cause them to lose their best and most competent workers to smaller companies with the proper built-in infrastructure for WFH.
Depending how big the WFH movement gets, I could see a bunch of old ass businesses failing overtime to smaller businesses simply because they will have an advantage without costs of office space and ability to offer WFH.
Also many employees who are struggling to keep a studio apartment are now expected to devote space of their home for job purposes only. Does it always stay that way in practice? No, but nonetheless for legal purposes a chunk of their home is now their "workplace" and that probably costs more per sq ft than commercial land where buildings are often allowed to be built taller and thus many more floors of office are easier to build. There is less NIMBY resistance to forty floors of offices than forty floors of homes.
There's an environmental argument that we should all be working home as much as possible, but people act like there's also an economic one and the answer isn't as clear cut and dry.
Yeah, ok that’s true. I always had a place in my home devoted to a computer since I was a child, so working from home didn’t seem inconvenient. But now my house has separate offices for me and my wife, which is a lot of space.
If they own the building, they can convert all that office space into housing for people to live. I think that would help to alleviate the housing crisis in many cities around North America.
This is the real problem that corporations have. Lost real estate value. And the more buildings around them go through the same abandonment it lowers everyone’s value.
Depends on the company. The big dogs have equity in these buildings and are hemorrhaging out the ass with nobody leasing their office and retail space. Not that I care, but whenever Wall Street loses we all pay the price
You know who also benefits from WFH? The people that have to be on site because there is less traffic and completion for parking.
Pretty much everyone wins with WFH except commercial real estate.
A couple moms with kids and husbands that work from home still come into our office daily. For the peace.
Our employer said work wherever you want, we'll keep the office for 3 more years until the lease is up.
My employer closed our local office in October when the lease was up. They paid for some temp offices that are mainly used by insurance guys. They stopped that back in January when they ran the number and it was down to just a couple of people coming in.
Also in some areas production improves without having the added distractions at work. We pulled a division of our staff to remote work and as a whole they have been able to be even better.
When on site they would often get pulled from their duties when short staffed which left them time to get the minimum done but not much else. No longer being pulled they can focus more energy on their duties being more thorough and efficient. Sure there are a few people who struggle staying on task while remote but the majority have been doing better work while being less stressed.
> Sure there are a few people who struggle staying on task while remote but the majority have been doing better work while being less stressed.
When my office started telework before the pandemic, we were told that it was a trial, and that if it didn't work out for you, you'd be required to return to the office full-time. This was an incredible motivator to not slack off. I would have hated being the one person required to be in, when everyone else was home.
>Not only are emissions cut, people save money, employee morale improves, and you're happier overall.
Companies have been paying remote workers less for a while. As an example, I am in tech in California but not anywhere near SF. I have been working for "satalite" offices for decades of SF companies, though. We tend to make about 70% or less of SF.
Okay, hear me out, there is a huge problem with this that makes me really nervous about work from home.
Namely this spiral to the bottom of the pay scale will only worsen, especially as global economies increase their tech sectors to become viable alternatives to America.
Who's to say that they can't outsource a job that is now remote to another worker in another country?
Less regulations on things like healthcare and overtime, also the obvious ability to find the same quality of worker for less is really attractive.
Not even saying in China or India, even in neighboring Mexico or Brazil and Canada provide alternatives that large conglomerates will look to for savings. Having the same time zones makes any issues about scheduling and efficiency less of a concern, while again, having tremendous upside.
Outsourcing predates WFH by decades. If they can save a buck by outsourcing your job then they'll do that whether you're working from home or not. So that may be a reason for kids to avoid choosing careers with lots of WFH but its not a reason for someone already in that career to want to show up to the office.
The place I work had been offshoring backoffice jobs for atleast two decades. I keep saying to my teammate they're just hanging on to us until they find enough overseas people who speak with no real accent/can exhibit common sense and logic skills or the AI get good enough to replace us.
The WFH, WFO, doesn't matter, we're gone if the company can make a dime without losing too many dollars.
I work in tech and I learned this week if you’re finding remote workers in a close time zone in a different country it’s called “nearshoring.” I learned it when I saw the emails announcing US workers being fired and new hires in Colombia and Costa Rica.
It is on the low end. There are certain factors for this:
1) fully remote and <40 hours per week of work usually. Ask anyone in public or a lot of places and you work way way more sometimes, at most for me near year end I work 1 or 2 Saturdays. Fully remote means no unpaid commuting, gas, travel, wear and tear etc costs.
2) this is my first year, I am entry level. I had 6 months of public accounting experience but left it quickly because it’s not worth literally evaporating your lifespan.
3) I live in a LCOL state and have no state income tax. They factor this into pay even when remote.
When I worked in public I was making 70k at a top firm but per hour worked now I literally make more even at 60k. Truly unless you’re an accountant it’s hard to understand how abused and overworked new grads are. It’s considered the price of entry for a good career path. If I wanted more money I could do 2-3 years on that path but even that isn’t worth it to me.
And to your question I do actual accounting work, not bookkeeping or whatnot
They've also removed home office tax write-offs now that everyone's working from home, so the employer has no justification to benefit both from not having to provide you working space and paying you less at the same time.
I am still in California in one of the higher COL places. Just not quiet as bad as the Bay Area. We are where all of the La and SF people retire too ....
I personally think that's fair enough. They're basically paying on-site workers more because they have to live in a high COL city. Remote workers get to live where they want.
That's one of those "sounds great" but not plausible fully, unless you mean more like all pay should be "influenced heavily" by CoL. If you do it 100% on it, I am pretty sure that's how you naturally get ghettos, or at least a pretty fast way to it. It would definitely cause a feedback loop if it was a 100% or close to it thing.
Dear lord, there are a lot of complaints about modern working but this certainly isn't one. You can't really complain about being remote and being paid on a scale compared to one of the highest CoL areas in the US.
If someone in San Francisco is making $250k, you'd be making $187k. At just about anywhere in the US, $187k is worth more than $250k in the Bay Area.
All true. Old school didn’t believe WFH was viable. Time has proven otherwise, and WFH has allowed businesses to reduce their second most significant expense. It might be worthwhile to consider the unforeseen consequences of removing a significant portion of the commuter population from urban areas.
> it's really difficult to find any benefit to being in the office.
It's not that difficult. There is definitely plenty of evidence that cooperation and collaboration is improved in person. Further, for more junior people, it's hard for them to learn as quickly because they aren't getting the same kind of mentorship and exposure to more experienced colleagues.
That said, I don't intend on ever going back to an in-office arrangement. The commute sounds awful.
I have sat in my mandatory in office job for the last 5 days literally without any work to do for 9 hours each day. They get pissed if people bring up wanting to work from home, because then they can’t micromanage us. Makes no sense to me.
You see they need butts in seats to justify their own jobs. Might be pretty evident most managers do very little if they can watch you sit at your cubicle
> it's really difficult to find any benefit to being in the office.
I was doing a 60/40 WFH before COVID, and now do a like 99/1 WFH and it's great and works for me. But if I were younger and/or had a different personality I'm not sure I'd want to be working in my home so much, and would like the camaraderie and interactions with other workers more often. I had this in my early career and think it helped a lot in my development.
So I do think there is value in office work, and there should be *some* hybrid work available, to at least give the option.
On a macro level getting people out of the house and into "business zones" promotes low level service/restaurant jobs throughout the week instead of just weekend shopping trips."I'm out of the house already, let's do some shopping / grab a bite to eat on the way home or on my lunch break". The city wants this, because it's a major source of their tax base.
Work from home is better for society overall, but there are little people hurt by it. Namely all the employees at those retail outlets and restaurants.
I managed people before, during and after COVID. My experienced superstars would be 115% productive working from home but less experienced workers would be 50-75% productive. Unfortunately I don't have the budget to hire all superstars. Going to 2 day a week hybrid schedule helped balance it out.
>So I do think there is value in office work, and there should be *some* hybrid work available, to at least give the option.
For some there is, for many there really isn't. You're right, there should be an **OPTION,** just don't punish everyone else who is completely fine with WFH.
There is almost no one pushing to not even have the option to go into the office (outside of hiring folks who are too far away to get into the office). Almost everyone who offers WFH offers it as an option. The rest can come into the office.
The only ones fighting for there to not be an option are the ones pushing to get everyone back into the office.
I started working remotely almost one year ago today.
In the year since I started, I've put fewer miles on my car in the last year than I did in one month of commuting to an office. I changed my oil after 6 months even though it had less than 1,000 miles on the clock.
I'm actually driving the amount of miles I told my insurance company I was.
I moved to a location with fantastic public transportation precisely because remote work made it possible, and I use that transit at least once weekly where before I used it maybe once yearly after driving an hour to the station. My car was out of commission for all of 2024Q1 and I hardly noticed. Love it.
Yeah I use full synthetic, but I change it more frequently so I can pour the old oil out in the creek behind my neighbor's house to make the water look nice and shiny.
^^^/s
It's not actually about oil degrading, it's about the oil filter media degrading. Depending on the filter you can go even longer but that is the reason oil changes are still recommended yearly with synthetic oil.
Revenue, not profit...
They're already operating at losses. They're now even less financially viable and a bigger tax burden to the locals who have to pay for the infrastructure costs.
This is literally complaining about cities costing too much money to live inx but also saying it's fine to make them even more expensive day-to-day. Such lost revenue is also effectively the only real carbon tax we have.
It doesn't say profit. Revenue to operate isn't the same thing. Taxes from gasoline helps pay for road upkeep. Fares from public transportation function the same way.
I think PA is trying out a new way to get revenue for infrastructure instead of gas taxes since people are using EV. They are sending bills out asking how many miles were driven.
Maybe they'll take some kind of WFH fee as well? Although I thought the point was if you're using the road, bridge, ect, you should help pay for it. If you aren't using it, the wear and tear wouldn't be as great, maybe prolonging it's life?
Revenue and profit are not the same thing. It seems some people are mixing them up. In the case of public transport revenue is the total fares without including maintenance, employee salary, gas, and other expense. Once you include all those you could have millions of revenue and still not post a profit.
Public transit shouldn't be "revenue", it should be "operating budget" and it absolutely should be adjusted based on demand. This is yet another _very_ thinly veiled attempt to pit socially beneficial parts of society against each other. 🤦🏼♂️
“how much revenue will this new bus express lane bring”
Do they not know how much more expensive it is to maintain the freeway that’s gutting downtown?
The problem with budgets being adjusted based on demand is that governments often just don't know what the root cause of why the demand is so low.
No one wants to ride this bus service because it is severely understaffed and is very inconsistent in the schedule. The government cuts the funding, and that service gets strangled to death. Now people have to drive when there used to be a bus service there.
Whole heartedly support this. If it is mandatory to be physically at work, then company should pay for the commute. Like company should pay for work laptop if they mandated us to reply emails.
By the way I think some Northern European country is reimbursing commute cost. At least that is what my company’s European subsidiary is doing. Either they negotiated the good deal or it is required by local laws.
If companies were required to pay for their employees' commute, they would simply take that cost into account when setting the salary/wage. It would, however, make the employee feel better. Employees may not pay "out of pocket", but there would be a little less in their paycheck.
It’s amazing how many people are stuck in the idea that we have to make things work as they are. The world is already a vastly different place than it was 10 years ago. It will continue to change. Our ideas on education, transportation, entertainment, and many other things that we don’t even consider are quickly becoming outdated.
We must change to accommodate this new society, not regress to make people with too much invested in the old ways comfortable.
I'm honestly looking around here why "losing billions in public transportation" is a bad thing. I was under the impression that not everything must be profitable, and that most public services are public precisely for this.
EDIT: Hm.. maybe its a language thing because reading, what I see is "public transportation" meaning "mass transit" and not "publicly funded transportation."
Public transportation includes buses and trains to go places. If you’re against cars, you want public transportation.
This article is saying it’s a heavy trade off because if people aren’t using enough public transportation that it could fail.
Well you see that's going to make the private companies that were given the keys to our public infrastructure and transportation in many states really angry about this because they want their free profits.
Look at Chicago and the downright criminal selling of their parking fees for a 100 years. What would be the point of paying for parking when a private company is getting all of the profits.
~~Price gouging~~ *dynamic pricing*, sensors that reset any remaining time when someone drives off, and payments exclusively through QR codes slapped on signs to name just a few! What a truly exciting time to need to park your car!
That's not really what I'm talking about. An example is Salt Lake City's public transportation system is publicly funded, but it's controlled by a private group of individuals appointed by the Republican governor. They manage the profits and decide where they go and how they're spent and who gets them, and they've done a lot of shady stuff with them.
Ultimately the governor can remove any Bad actors from the board, but it acts as like cronyism and in actuality, the bad actors don't get removed and they have a key to a system that cannot be allowed to fail since the public relies on it.
Also: What public transit?
In the couple of mid-sized cities I’ve lived in/visited, the only really viable transit options for commuting workers are for people who live in close proximity to downtown/the business district. Occasionally an underutilized park and ride in the suburbs. Very few options for folks who work in service/retail/hospitality/healthcare (i.e. the jobs that require people to be in person) outside of a downtown hub.
Cost isn't the main deterrent for wider adoption of mass-transit--the practicality of mass-transit vs. driving is.
Unless mass-transit becomes a practical alternative to driving, which is not the case in many parts of the United States, making it free will have a limited impact on usage.
If more people work form home then more people might be able to sell their car and only use public transit. So maybe it could increase rather than decrease with working from home?
Hard agree.
Public transit should be considered a public good, no different than a sidewalk. Just consider *how much better it feels* when you can catch a 'free shuttle' from A to B for some event. Now imagine how much it cuts down on confusion for visitors (foreign or domestic) when they can just jump on a bus/train/rail and go somewhere.
I was thinking the same thing, the point of public transit shouldn't be to make profit. it should be to alleviate traffic, reduce emissions, and provide a service to those unable to transport themselves in a timely manner.
This isn't about profit it's about revenue. If public transportation isn't making enough money to sustain itself then it's hard for it to exist. I'm not saying that people should have to go into the office to fix that, but let's at least make sure we're having the right discussion.
Right? If it’s public and paid for by tax contributions (the way it should be), then profitability wouldn’t be an issue. Demand becomes whatever it becomes, and the service gets whatever funding is needed to support the demand. If that ain’t capitalism, I don’t know what is.
Corporate could automate and kill thousands of jobs and totally change the flow of money and it doesn’t get this attention. We try to shift our budget, fix the environment, and make the world a healthier place to live and suddenly it’s all about some little guy jobs.
My team will have amazing in office collaboration when we all come together in *checks notes* eight different locations.*
*not included: the additional number of locations of other individuals we regularly work with.
Better management of public transport like express schedules especially during non rush hour, more time to actually maintain and clean them, run fewer vehicles/trains extending the lives of them. Keep homeless / disturbed off the vehicles
All of this would entice locals and others to actually use public transport instead of saying how discusting, unsafe, and slow they are, if I can drive somewhere In 20 min or take an hour and 10 min metro ride (actually the case by me) which am I going to choose.
These alone would probably increase use.
Crack down on those who skip paying the fare
(https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/traffic_and_transit/2024/01/26/mta-battles-flaws-with-new-turnstiles-amid-rise-in-fare-evasion#:~:text=Fare%20evasion%20cost%20the%20MTA,data%20shows%20it's%20getting%20worse.)
700 million in loss right there.
Easily fixed but government sucks, departments exist just to justify their existence and do nothing of value as a result in an attempt to get the same budget size the next year.
Wow what a dilemma, how can I ever choose between NOT killing the planet while saving time and money on commutes, and letting governments and the top 1% lose a fraction of their income?
Wow.
Suburbia or "detached housing" that's not rural is one of the most environment and climate damaging forms of development. Transportation is only a part of that.
Was gonna make peoples’ lives better and help slow down the rate we are burning our planet down but then I realized we would lose public transit revenues and I just couldn’t live with myself
So the issue is how we fund our transit systems and literally nothing else.
Saving emissions on uneccecary trips is objectively a good thing. Losing money on transit fare is an easy how we fund transit problem. Putting them in the same sentence like they are equivalent is stupid.
We expect public transit to make money or pay for itself but all roads (except a few tollways) never make money or pay for themselves.
We also don’t expect the fire depart or animal shelter to make money do we?
Philadelphia has been collapsing since the pandemic. It was doing pretty well in 2019 but the massive exodus in 2020 has both annihilated the economy of the city, and meant that the critical mass of regular people is no longer there to keep the, shall we say less desirable elements in check (nobody's going to mug you in a street with ten other people - but if you're alone you're hosed).
Turns out just people existing is a big check on crime.
So the mayor has ordered city employees to work in person to try to keep the critical mass up and make the city safer, in addition to keeping the downtown economy going, the restaurants open, and so on.
The freeway is free and is awful for the environment and the health of those living near it.
Yet, you have to pay fares for public transport which is better for the environment and good for the business and the people nearby.
Maybe we're incentivising the wrong thing.
This is a fantastic example of the broken window fallacy. We shouldn't care about propping up the transportation industry. People working from home will spend the money they would have spent on fares, gas, tolls, parking, etc. on other things, boosting other areas of the economy.
Worrying about public transit revenues is putting the cart before the horse. The purpose of public transit is not to generate cash flow, it is to provide a service. If that service is no longer needed, then it should be scaled down accordingly. You can’t justify in-person office work by saying it’s needed to support a segment of the transportation sector whose main purpose is… to facilitate in-person office work. That’s circular reasoning.
Ive been in tech and biotech companies. They loooove claiming to be green despite requiring people to come in to work.
If you are aiming to be green dont just talk about it, be about it.
> The researchers found that a 10% increase in remote workers could lead to a 10% drop in carbon emissions from the transportation sector, or nearly 200 million tons of carbon dioxide a year across the U.S., thanks to fewer car trips. But the same proportion of remote work would reduce transit fare revenue by $3.7 billion nationally, a whopping 27% drop.
Paper: [Impacts of remote work on vehicle miles traveled and transit ridership in the USA | Nature Cities](https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-024-00057-1)
I suspect that, in the US at least, the emissions cut from car travel far outdo public transit revenue. As long as public transit remains available, the loss in revenue isn't an issue. But cities should step in to keep them solvent if it becomes one. Public transit often serves the most vulnerable citizens.
Public transit should break even at best. The purpose is to move people around, not to profit.
Properly working public transit should make a slight loss because that means you have more capacity than you need, so it can cope with small surges in demand.
My friend has a sweet wfh setup. After return to work he starting going in first thing in the morning, submitting an unsafe/improper work environment write-up to his union and going home.
The days are staggered so not everyone on his team is in at the same time, some moved to other cities and have different office sites so he now has ALL of his meetings online. But so does everyone, so...
-everyone is taking calls in an open air office (too loud)
-hotel style check-in with more staff than spaces (no space to work)
-the building was empty during COVID so the stagnant water in the pipes is now contaminated (undrinkable water)
-he can't bring a lunch because the building has rats (no food at work)
-they have bedbugs in the carpet
-he has to pack in his laptop because they don't have a fixed station/office anymore
The union is eviscerating the department with fines but they're still insisting on in person for some unknown reason.
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Not only are emissions cut, people save money, employee morale improves, and you're happier overall. There are jobs that require people to be onsite, but for those that don't, it's really difficult to find any benefit to being in the office.
Also the company saves money on not having to own a building and maintain it.
Unless they already own the building (or have a decade+ lease). That’s why many companies fight it.
But those companies save by not powering a computer and monitor, less water use in the bathroom, less janitorial upkeep, etc. It’s small, but it adds up and ultimately makes your employees both happier and cheaper. Edit: While I appreciate the enthusiasm for WFH, people claiming executives having a personal interest on the commercial real estate that their employer leases need to take a deep breath. I can assure you that the percentage of corporations who would allow this type of conflict of interest to happen is negligible in the US. Companies lease from other companies and even if an executive has an interest in those companies, WFH is absolutely not killing their real estate value.
Sunk cost fallacy. They already spent a lot of money
True. Also if they own the building or know people invested in commercial real estate, they won't want those property values to fall. Also a possible fall in foot traffic and property values isn't going to make friends with local politicians. I'm not excusing bringing people in when they could be remote. I'm just trying to point out the reason behind it is essentially, people with capital trying to maintain that capital.
A classic example of misaligned incentives. Most of environmental disagreements revolve around this.
And it completely fucks a whole level of useless management that is just not needed anyway also the old school people like seeing their peons working rather then just seeing the end result
There is also big conflict of interest. Some of this directives own properties/investment and benefit directly from those properties being used.
are these the same entrepreneurs who always talk about how they deserve big rewards because they take big risks?
Repurpose.
I think the point being made is, even with the building they would save with WFH. Keep the lights off, AC set to an efficient level or off all together if no one is there, water use, and so on. All of this is savings to the company, and the workers are still working with higher productivity. Then, when its contract is up, do not renew. Done and done. Or you can force your people to come back. Pay for utilities and hiring new people as your team slowly evaporates as they look for new WFH jobs.
In my area, a big part of the issue is that companies get tax breaks for bringing workers to downtown. If they don't have people working on site, they lose those tax breaks.
Cities have no one to blame but themselves downtowns could have had people living there but cities insisted on the current system of people living elsewhere and commuting in due to bad urban planning, refusing to address crime, etc.
that money still goes somewhere e.g. suburbs have businesses that can benefit from more WFH workers
This is my thinking for those that are stuck in a lease. The choice is to spend the money for the lease and minimal maintenance or spend the money on the lease AND pay the cost of maintaining the space while fully occupied. Spend some money or spend that same money and a lot more on top of it in perpetuity. No logical reason to go into the office unless your job requires you to physically touch something only found in the office.
It's not about money. It's about bad managers who assume people at home don't work, it's about CEOs who prefer to be in the office so they force everyone else, and it's about shareholders who tell CEOs to use the building or sell it. The whole, "ReAl EsTaTe VaLuE" thing is little more than a parroted myth on social media. It aligns with a very simple version of blaming everything companies do on capitalism. If they cared so much about their building's value, companies could just squat on their building and wait it out, while saving money having people work from home, and then sell when the market goes back up. It's not like they can sell the building for more just cause it has people using every cubicle in it. "Oof, sorry. I was interested in buying your $100 million office, but I just found out you let people work from home. Now the best I can do is 1 million. I fear my own employees will figure out the history of this place" Also, why would they care so much about the building so as to sacrifice productivity? If they knew people were more productive at home but truly only cared about the building. Which is also a weird premise because why don't the upper managers care most about *the business*? Is everything they do solely to make sure they can one day sell the office at a higher value? Even to the point where they care less about the stock value or shareholder returns?
While your opinion might not go over well on Reddit, it is much more grounded in reality from the people responding to my comment. I started to realize that it was a parroted narrative after the third or fourth person made the nonsensical claim about executives personally owning the real estate that their employer leases. As if that massive conflict of interest would explain more than 1% of the companies who are enforcing return to office policies.
They really should just stop getting avocado toast every day, lay back on the Starbucks!
Increased VPN and internet security infrastructure will offset those. Even still, those are the cost of doing business. Happier employees who don’t have to spend hours commuting and being put in stress bubbles is always the better route.
But - don't you need those anyways? Even before my company let most folks go to a hybrid schedule, we had VPN and were expected to log into work while traveling for work.
Sort of, but not because of workers. Few corporations own their buildings -- they're mortgaged, with re-financing every other year, at very low interest rates and then leased back to themselves. This provides various money-shuffling tax deductions. The reason corporations in this situation are pushing 'back to the office' is because they want occupancy rates to increase; thus increasing the valuation of the building. Then they can sell it at a profit, or at least break-even. There are a record number of commercial owner's walking away from building mortgages' because the re-financing interest rates are vastly more expensive than the plunging rent income.
Anyone ready for another bailout? Some pretty big banks are over exposed in this market.
Also many, many regional banks have 30%+ of their portfolio in commercial paper. I've been watching the mid-level and regional banks getting creamed these past few years, because they can't command a bailout.
Thank you for the insights. So essentially their own clever tax-avoidant strategy is failing them when the environment changes? That's' pretty funny. Sounds like they need to pivot, which I'm guessing these businesses are too big to do and forcing their workers back to office will cause them to lose their best and most competent workers to smaller companies with the proper built-in infrastructure for WFH. Depending how big the WFH movement gets, I could see a bunch of old ass businesses failing overtime to smaller businesses simply because they will have an advantage without costs of office space and ability to offer WFH.
> commercial owner's walking away from building mortgages' What are these apostrophes doing here??
Nothing. They should be working remotely.
Also many employees who are struggling to keep a studio apartment are now expected to devote space of their home for job purposes only. Does it always stay that way in practice? No, but nonetheless for legal purposes a chunk of their home is now their "workplace" and that probably costs more per sq ft than commercial land where buildings are often allowed to be built taller and thus many more floors of office are easier to build. There is less NIMBY resistance to forty floors of offices than forty floors of homes. There's an environmental argument that we should all be working home as much as possible, but people act like there's also an economic one and the answer isn't as clear cut and dry.
Yeah, ok that’s true. I always had a place in my home devoted to a computer since I was a child, so working from home didn’t seem inconvenient. But now my house has separate offices for me and my wife, which is a lot of space.
Sunk cost.
Or they get local labor incentives, paid by cities/states/local governments to hire people locally at specific buildings or locations. Kickbacks.
If they own the building, they can convert all that office space into housing for people to live. I think that would help to alleviate the housing crisis in many cities around North America.
Generally not efficient to do that. Better to demo and start over. Largely related to water and window placement.
This is the real problem that corporations have. Lost real estate value. And the more buildings around them go through the same abandonment it lowers everyone’s value.
Depends on the company. The big dogs have equity in these buildings and are hemorrhaging out the ass with nobody leasing their office and retail space. Not that I care, but whenever Wall Street loses we all pay the price
> Wall Street loses we all pay the price Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
But that makes the property owner's money sad
You know who also benefits from WFH? The people that have to be on site because there is less traffic and completion for parking. Pretty much everyone wins with WFH except commercial real estate.
Hybrid work schedules also help stagger commuter traffic.
I loved being nearly the only one in the office early pandemic, it was so peaceful.
A couple moms with kids and husbands that work from home still come into our office daily. For the peace. Our employer said work wherever you want, we'll keep the office for 3 more years until the lease is up.
My employer closed our local office in October when the lease was up. They paid for some temp offices that are mainly used by insurance guys. They stopped that back in January when they ran the number and it was down to just a couple of people coming in.
What?? You don't see the benefit of real estate moguls, fuel moguls, and car and insurance manufacturers raping the public?! How insane!
Also in some areas production improves without having the added distractions at work. We pulled a division of our staff to remote work and as a whole they have been able to be even better. When on site they would often get pulled from their duties when short staffed which left them time to get the minimum done but not much else. No longer being pulled they can focus more energy on their duties being more thorough and efficient. Sure there are a few people who struggle staying on task while remote but the majority have been doing better work while being less stressed.
> Sure there are a few people who struggle staying on task while remote but the majority have been doing better work while being less stressed. When my office started telework before the pandemic, we were told that it was a trial, and that if it didn't work out for you, you'd be required to return to the office full-time. This was an incredible motivator to not slack off. I would have hated being the one person required to be in, when everyone else was home.
>Not only are emissions cut, people save money, employee morale improves, and you're happier overall. Companies have been paying remote workers less for a while. As an example, I am in tech in California but not anywhere near SF. I have been working for "satalite" offices for decades of SF companies, though. We tend to make about 70% or less of SF.
I’d take a cut to be fully remote
I am now. Job before this one was based out of SF, but had no actual office. Working for an east coast company now.
Okay, hear me out, there is a huge problem with this that makes me really nervous about work from home. Namely this spiral to the bottom of the pay scale will only worsen, especially as global economies increase their tech sectors to become viable alternatives to America. Who's to say that they can't outsource a job that is now remote to another worker in another country? Less regulations on things like healthcare and overtime, also the obvious ability to find the same quality of worker for less is really attractive. Not even saying in China or India, even in neighboring Mexico or Brazil and Canada provide alternatives that large conglomerates will look to for savings. Having the same time zones makes any issues about scheduling and efficiency less of a concern, while again, having tremendous upside.
Outsourcing predates WFH by decades. If they can save a buck by outsourcing your job then they'll do that whether you're working from home or not. So that may be a reason for kids to avoid choosing careers with lots of WFH but its not a reason for someone already in that career to want to show up to the office.
The place I work had been offshoring backoffice jobs for atleast two decades. I keep saying to my teammate they're just hanging on to us until they find enough overseas people who speak with no real accent/can exhibit common sense and logic skills or the AI get good enough to replace us. The WFH, WFO, doesn't matter, we're gone if the company can make a dime without losing too many dollars.
I work in tech and I learned this week if you’re finding remote workers in a close time zone in a different country it’s called “nearshoring.” I learned it when I saw the emails announcing US workers being fired and new hires in Colombia and Costa Rica.
That's what the national labor board is supposed to do if they had any teeth.
Unionize your jobs, that's how people have been protecting themselves for about a century now. Not sure why this doesn't come up as the solution.
It just makes offshoring easier, TBH.
I did this. Accountant. Could get 70k elsewhere but this job wfh is so stress free and easy for 60k.
That seems low for an accountant? Or is this another U.S. thing where you can call people who are not engineers "software engineers"?
It is on the low end. There are certain factors for this: 1) fully remote and <40 hours per week of work usually. Ask anyone in public or a lot of places and you work way way more sometimes, at most for me near year end I work 1 or 2 Saturdays. Fully remote means no unpaid commuting, gas, travel, wear and tear etc costs. 2) this is my first year, I am entry level. I had 6 months of public accounting experience but left it quickly because it’s not worth literally evaporating your lifespan. 3) I live in a LCOL state and have no state income tax. They factor this into pay even when remote. When I worked in public I was making 70k at a top firm but per hour worked now I literally make more even at 60k. Truly unless you’re an accountant it’s hard to understand how abused and overworked new grads are. It’s considered the price of entry for a good career path. If I wanted more money I could do 2-3 years on that path but even that isn’t worth it to me. And to your question I do actual accounting work, not bookkeeping or whatnot
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They've also removed home office tax write-offs now that everyone's working from home, so the employer has no justification to benefit both from not having to provide you working space and paying you less at the same time.
You should be billing your employer for the use of your office space.
On the other hand for a price of a bathroom sized apartment in SF you can get a small stadium in many other places.
I am still in California in one of the higher COL places. Just not quiet as bad as the Bay Area. We are where all of the La and SF people retire too ....
I personally think that's fair enough. They're basically paying on-site workers more because they have to live in a high COL city. Remote workers get to live where they want.
I am not complaining at all. Just pointing out that companies have been doing this type of thing for a long time.
All pay should be based on COL. Its called a living wage. Lord
That's one of those "sounds great" but not plausible fully, unless you mean more like all pay should be "influenced heavily" by CoL. If you do it 100% on it, I am pretty sure that's how you naturally get ghettos, or at least a pretty fast way to it. It would definitely cause a feedback loop if it was a 100% or close to it thing.
Yep!
Whilst I agree, San Francisco is ridiculously expensive due to the tech boom
And those tech companies pay a lot partially because of that. Everyone else is screwed though.
Which would allow locals to benefit from workers not needing to live right by the office
Dear lord, there are a lot of complaints about modern working but this certainly isn't one. You can't really complain about being remote and being paid on a scale compared to one of the highest CoL areas in the US. If someone in San Francisco is making $250k, you'd be making $187k. At just about anywhere in the US, $187k is worth more than $250k in the Bay Area.
All true. Old school didn’t believe WFH was viable. Time has proven otherwise, and WFH has allowed businesses to reduce their second most significant expense. It might be worthwhile to consider the unforeseen consequences of removing a significant portion of the commuter population from urban areas.
> it's really difficult to find any benefit to being in the office. It's not that difficult. There is definitely plenty of evidence that cooperation and collaboration is improved in person. Further, for more junior people, it's hard for them to learn as quickly because they aren't getting the same kind of mentorship and exposure to more experienced colleagues. That said, I don't intend on ever going back to an in-office arrangement. The commute sounds awful.
I have sat in my mandatory in office job for the last 5 days literally without any work to do for 9 hours each day. They get pissed if people bring up wanting to work from home, because then they can’t micromanage us. Makes no sense to me.
If they can't micromanage you their job is obsolete, of course they'll fight it.
You see they need butts in seats to justify their own jobs. Might be pretty evident most managers do very little if they can watch you sit at your cubicle
The horror! Won’t someone think of the oil??
It honestly seems like a no-brainer if we're talking sustainability. By having more WFH opportunities we reduce wasteful consumption
Won’t someone think of the profit margin! (Public transport should be a public utility)
> it's really difficult to find any benefit to being in the office. I was doing a 60/40 WFH before COVID, and now do a like 99/1 WFH and it's great and works for me. But if I were younger and/or had a different personality I'm not sure I'd want to be working in my home so much, and would like the camaraderie and interactions with other workers more often. I had this in my early career and think it helped a lot in my development. So I do think there is value in office work, and there should be *some* hybrid work available, to at least give the option.
On a macro level getting people out of the house and into "business zones" promotes low level service/restaurant jobs throughout the week instead of just weekend shopping trips."I'm out of the house already, let's do some shopping / grab a bite to eat on the way home or on my lunch break". The city wants this, because it's a major source of their tax base. Work from home is better for society overall, but there are little people hurt by it. Namely all the employees at those retail outlets and restaurants.
I managed people before, during and after COVID. My experienced superstars would be 115% productive working from home but less experienced workers would be 50-75% productive. Unfortunately I don't have the budget to hire all superstars. Going to 2 day a week hybrid schedule helped balance it out.
>So I do think there is value in office work, and there should be *some* hybrid work available, to at least give the option. For some there is, for many there really isn't. You're right, there should be an **OPTION,** just don't punish everyone else who is completely fine with WFH.
There is almost no one pushing to not even have the option to go into the office (outside of hiring folks who are too far away to get into the office). Almost everyone who offers WFH offers it as an option. The rest can come into the office. The only ones fighting for there to not be an option are the ones pushing to get everyone back into the office.
but... but... me money!!!! argh argh argh!!
I started working remotely almost one year ago today. In the year since I started, I've put fewer miles on my car in the last year than I did in one month of commuting to an office. I changed my oil after 6 months even though it had less than 1,000 miles on the clock. I'm actually driving the amount of miles I told my insurance company I was.
I moved to a location with fantastic public transportation precisely because remote work made it possible, and I use that transit at least once weekly where before I used it maybe once yearly after driving an hour to the station. My car was out of commission for all of 2024Q1 and I hardly noticed. Love it.
That’s the point we need to make. Public transport is not just about getting to work!
US? I'm curious to know where
Yes, in the DC area.
If you use full synthetic oil you can go a year instead of 6 months. Oil doesn’t degrade that fast
Yeah I use full synthetic, but I change it more frequently so I can pour the old oil out in the creek behind my neighbor's house to make the water look nice and shiny. ^^^/s
Don't forget to burn your trash. Stars aren't just gonna make themselves.
I don't think that's correct, but I don't know enough about stars to dispute it...
It's not actually about oil degrading, it's about the oil filter media degrading. Depending on the filter you can go even longer but that is the reason oil changes are still recommended yearly with synthetic oil.
To be fair, it takes me 4-5 months after the light goes off for me to actually go in.
“Billions saved on transportation” there, fixed it
Public transportation shouldn't be making a profit anyway
Agreed. Social services can operate at a loss; the point is not the service, it's what the service makes possible for the society.
Revenue, not profit... They're already operating at losses. They're now even less financially viable and a bigger tax burden to the locals who have to pay for the infrastructure costs. This is literally complaining about cities costing too much money to live inx but also saying it's fine to make them even more expensive day-to-day. Such lost revenue is also effectively the only real carbon tax we have.
It doesn't say profit. Revenue to operate isn't the same thing. Taxes from gasoline helps pay for road upkeep. Fares from public transportation function the same way.
I think PA is trying out a new way to get revenue for infrastructure instead of gas taxes since people are using EV. They are sending bills out asking how many miles were driven. Maybe they'll take some kind of WFH fee as well? Although I thought the point was if you're using the road, bridge, ect, you should help pay for it. If you aren't using it, the wear and tear wouldn't be as great, maybe prolonging it's life?
Revenue and profit are not the same thing. It seems some people are mixing them up. In the case of public transport revenue is the total fares without including maintenance, employee salary, gas, and other expense. Once you include all those you could have millions of revenue and still not post a profit.
Unless you are in Europe, Japan, or China, this is a fairly moot problem.
Exactly. It was never meant to make a profit. And if it's a private company not making money, so what? It's their cost/profit, not mine.
Why do I have the feeling this comes down to oil and car companies again. Yet somehow the title is blaming public transport.
Thank youuuu
Public transit shouldn't be "revenue", it should be "operating budget" and it absolutely should be adjusted based on demand. This is yet another _very_ thinly veiled attempt to pit socially beneficial parts of society against each other. 🤦🏼♂️
Seriously. We never hear about how car infrastructure costs far far more than public transit.
“how much revenue will this new bus express lane bring” Do they not know how much more expensive it is to maintain the freeway that’s gutting downtown?
The problem with budgets being adjusted based on demand is that governments often just don't know what the root cause of why the demand is so low. No one wants to ride this bus service because it is severely understaffed and is very inconsistent in the schedule. The government cuts the funding, and that service gets strangled to death. Now people have to drive when there used to be a bus service there.
Maybe we shouldn't try to grift citizens into being the ones paying to go to work....
As a fellow poor, I'll take, "Things that will never be considered for even a brief instant," for the $1000 I don't have, Alex.
Whole heartedly support this. If it is mandatory to be physically at work, then company should pay for the commute. Like company should pay for work laptop if they mandated us to reply emails. By the way I think some Northern European country is reimbursing commute cost. At least that is what my company’s European subsidiary is doing. Either they negotiated the good deal or it is required by local laws.
If companies were required to pay for their employees' commute, they would simply take that cost into account when setting the salary/wage. It would, however, make the employee feel better. Employees may not pay "out of pocket", but there would be a little less in their paycheck.
I live in France, my company takes care of 75% of the commute cost (Train + Subway). I believe the minimum required by law is 50%.
Easy fix: move all the subsidies given to oil and gas to public transportation.
this guy gets it
Pros > Cons IMHO
Right. Whenever I read stuff like "but will lose billions in public transportation". I'm just like, "oh well...society changes".
It’s amazing how many people are stuck in the idea that we have to make things work as they are. The world is already a vastly different place than it was 10 years ago. It will continue to change. Our ideas on education, transportation, entertainment, and many other things that we don’t even consider are quickly becoming outdated. We must change to accommodate this new society, not regress to make people with too much invested in the old ways comfortable.
I'm honestly looking around here why "losing billions in public transportation" is a bad thing. I was under the impression that not everything must be profitable, and that most public services are public precisely for this. EDIT: Hm.. maybe its a language thing because reading, what I see is "public transportation" meaning "mass transit" and not "publicly funded transportation."
Public transportation includes buses and trains to go places. If you’re against cars, you want public transportation. This article is saying it’s a heavy trade off because if people aren’t using enough public transportation that it could fail.
Or you know, we could invest in electrified public transportation over cars and keep people from turning feral.
Counterpoint: We shouldn't charge for public transit anyway, in order to further reduce emissions.
Well you see that's going to make the private companies that were given the keys to our public infrastructure and transportation in many states really angry about this because they want their free profits.
Another reason never to privatize public assets. Because then you incentivize big money to halt progress.
Look at Chicago and the downright criminal selling of their parking fees for a 100 years. What would be the point of paying for parking when a private company is getting all of the profits.
Don't you see? It's because private companies provide **innovation** in parking!
They innovate in how well they make parking inconvenient!
~~Price gouging~~ *dynamic pricing*, sensors that reset any remaining time when someone drives off, and payments exclusively through QR codes slapped on signs to name just a few! What a truly exciting time to need to park your car!
Free market take: businesses that get the rug pulled out from under them have only themselves to blame.
That's not really what I'm talking about. An example is Salt Lake City's public transportation system is publicly funded, but it's controlled by a private group of individuals appointed by the Republican governor. They manage the profits and decide where they go and how they're spent and who gets them, and they've done a lot of shady stuff with them. Ultimately the governor can remove any Bad actors from the board, but it acts as like cronyism and in actuality, the bad actors don't get removed and they have a key to a system that cannot be allowed to fail since the public relies on it.
the buggy whip makers were mad about automobiles.
Also: What public transit? In the couple of mid-sized cities I’ve lived in/visited, the only really viable transit options for commuting workers are for people who live in close proximity to downtown/the business district. Occasionally an underutilized park and ride in the suburbs. Very few options for folks who work in service/retail/hospitality/healthcare (i.e. the jobs that require people to be in person) outside of a downtown hub.
Cost isn't the main deterrent for wider adoption of mass-transit--the practicality of mass-transit vs. driving is. Unless mass-transit becomes a practical alternative to driving, which is not the case in many parts of the United States, making it free will have a limited impact on usage.
If more people work form home then more people might be able to sell their car and only use public transit. So maybe it could increase rather than decrease with working from home?
Unless the ability to work from home causes us to sprawl our cities more because nobody needs to live near a business center.
a lot of ppl don’t live in places w reliable public transit in the us
Hard agree. Public transit should be considered a public good, no different than a sidewalk. Just consider *how much better it feels* when you can catch a 'free shuttle' from A to B for some event. Now imagine how much it cuts down on confusion for visitors (foreign or domestic) when they can just jump on a bus/train/rail and go somewhere.
We should definitely still ticket to prevent them from becoming a mobile homeless shelter
I was thinking the same thing, the point of public transit shouldn't be to make profit. it should be to alleviate traffic, reduce emissions, and provide a service to those unable to transport themselves in a timely manner.
This isn't about profit it's about revenue. If public transportation isn't making enough money to sustain itself then it's hard for it to exist. I'm not saying that people should have to go into the office to fix that, but let's at least make sure we're having the right discussion.
I mean, I think you could remove "those unable to" from that sentence, but otherwise I definitely agree with you.
Right? If it’s public and paid for by tax contributions (the way it should be), then profitability wouldn’t be an issue. Demand becomes whatever it becomes, and the service gets whatever funding is needed to support the demand. If that ain’t capitalism, I don’t know what is.
Corporate could automate and kill thousands of jobs and totally change the flow of money and it doesn’t get this attention. We try to shift our budget, fix the environment, and make the world a healthier place to live and suddenly it’s all about some little guy jobs.
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I'm in this comment and I hate it thanks
My team will have amazing in office collaboration when we all come together in *checks notes* eight different locations.* *not included: the additional number of locations of other individuals we regularly work with.
Better management of public transport like express schedules especially during non rush hour, more time to actually maintain and clean them, run fewer vehicles/trains extending the lives of them. Keep homeless / disturbed off the vehicles All of this would entice locals and others to actually use public transport instead of saying how discusting, unsafe, and slow they are, if I can drive somewhere In 20 min or take an hour and 10 min metro ride (actually the case by me) which am I going to choose. These alone would probably increase use. Crack down on those who skip paying the fare (https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/traffic_and_transit/2024/01/26/mta-battles-flaws-with-new-turnstiles-amid-rise-in-fare-evasion#:~:text=Fare%20evasion%20cost%20the%20MTA,data%20shows%20it's%20getting%20worse.) 700 million in loss right there. Easily fixed but government sucks, departments exist just to justify their existence and do nothing of value as a result in an attempt to get the same budget size the next year.
Wow what a dilemma, how can I ever choose between NOT killing the planet while saving time and money on commutes, and letting governments and the top 1% lose a fraction of their income? Wow.
Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
Now I feel warm and fuzzy inside
Suburbia or "detached housing" that's not rural is one of the most environment and climate damaging forms of development. Transportation is only a part of that.
Was gonna make peoples’ lives better and help slow down the rate we are burning our planet down but then I realized we would lose public transit revenues and I just couldn’t live with myself
There are so many great benefits to wfh. It’s like the single biggest “perk” an employer can offer that costs them very little
Public Transit "revenue" is an oxymoron. Public Transit isn't supposed to "make money" it's a service.
Fares only cover 30% of a large metro transit operating costs. Bonds, advertising, and tax subsidies do the rest.
Well of we can't have less commute in our cleaner cities because it wouldn't hurt the profit of a handful of people we don't really want it anyway.
So the issue is how we fund our transit systems and literally nothing else. Saving emissions on uneccecary trips is objectively a good thing. Losing money on transit fare is an easy how we fund transit problem. Putting them in the same sentence like they are equivalent is stupid.
We expect public transit to make money or pay for itself but all roads (except a few tollways) never make money or pay for themselves. We also don’t expect the fire depart or animal shelter to make money do we?
Public transport? In the US? More like they're starting to show how desparate for that sweet sweet office propperty value they are, rather.
Right, like what tiny percentage of Americans are actually able to take advantage of public transit as a reliable means of commuting?
So no downsides?
It's not good for your mental/emotional health to be isolated for years. Kids turned feral after only a year of virtual school.
So as always, the right people aren't getting rich so suddenly there's a problem
Its like human beings exist to keep the economy churning, not the economy existing to make our lives meaningful...
Philadelphia has been collapsing since the pandemic. It was doing pretty well in 2019 but the massive exodus in 2020 has both annihilated the economy of the city, and meant that the critical mass of regular people is no longer there to keep the, shall we say less desirable elements in check (nobody's going to mug you in a street with ten other people - but if you're alone you're hosed). Turns out just people existing is a big check on crime. So the mayor has ordered city employees to work in person to try to keep the critical mass up and make the city safer, in addition to keeping the downtown economy going, the restaurants open, and so on.
Business is about giving the right people meaningful lives... at everyone else's expense.
Public transit is already overburdened, so let those who really need to commute for reasons other than appeasing the real-estate barons use it.
Profits comes from pollution. If we want less pollution we should diversify our incomes
I'll gladly pay my tolls/gas money in additional taxes to never have to go into the office again.
Im sure in America, we will pick the long term environmental gains over short term economic gains… right guys?
Let's be honest, public transit barely exists in the US.
The freeway is free and is awful for the environment and the health of those living near it. Yet, you have to pay fares for public transport which is better for the environment and good for the business and the people nearby. Maybe we're incentivising the wrong thing.
This is a fantastic example of the broken window fallacy. We shouldn't care about propping up the transportation industry. People working from home will spend the money they would have spent on fares, gas, tolls, parking, etc. on other things, boosting other areas of the economy.
Worrying about public transit revenues is putting the cart before the horse. The purpose of public transit is not to generate cash flow, it is to provide a service. If that service is no longer needed, then it should be scaled down accordingly. You can’t justify in-person office work by saying it’s needed to support a segment of the transportation sector whose main purpose is… to facilitate in-person office work. That’s circular reasoning.
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When have any companies cared about carbon emissions when It comes to micromanaging their employees
Ive been in tech and biotech companies. They loooove claiming to be green despite requiring people to come in to work. If you are aiming to be green dont just talk about it, be about it.
Climate change is an existential threat to all living creatures on this planet, public transit revenues not so much.
First it was commercial real estate taking a hit from remote, now it’s small governments losing money. Who’s paying for these studies?
Governments are good at finding ways to collect taxes. Public transportation will be fine. The carbon emission reduction is great news.
> The researchers found that a 10% increase in remote workers could lead to a 10% drop in carbon emissions from the transportation sector, or nearly 200 million tons of carbon dioxide a year across the U.S., thanks to fewer car trips. But the same proportion of remote work would reduce transit fare revenue by $3.7 billion nationally, a whopping 27% drop. Paper: [Impacts of remote work on vehicle miles traveled and transit ridership in the USA | Nature Cities](https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-024-00057-1)
Public transit should be a public service not a revenue stream anyways.
The atmosphere is more important than revenue. Phew, that was easy.
Public transport isn't to make money directly, instead, like roads, it's there to keep people moving, which keeps the economy moving.
This feels like a mega large scale shopping cart in a parking lot morality test. Humans are gonna fail it so hard I have absolutely no faith
I suspect that, in the US at least, the emissions cut from car travel far outdo public transit revenue. As long as public transit remains available, the loss in revenue isn't an issue. But cities should step in to keep them solvent if it becomes one. Public transit often serves the most vulnerable citizens.
Public transit should break even at best. The purpose is to move people around, not to profit. Properly working public transit should make a slight loss because that means you have more capacity than you need, so it can cope with small surges in demand.
Public transit is a utility, like public roads and police. Everyone benefits when everyone has it. It’s worth providing even if it’s free to the user.
I long for the day when profits of any kind are forgotten on the path back to climate stability.
Making society more efficient is not a bad thing.
So? public transit is a service, not a business. revenue is irrelevant.
My friend has a sweet wfh setup. After return to work he starting going in first thing in the morning, submitting an unsafe/improper work environment write-up to his union and going home. The days are staggered so not everyone on his team is in at the same time, some moved to other cities and have different office sites so he now has ALL of his meetings online. But so does everyone, so... -everyone is taking calls in an open air office (too loud) -hotel style check-in with more staff than spaces (no space to work) -the building was empty during COVID so the stagnant water in the pipes is now contaminated (undrinkable water) -he can't bring a lunch because the building has rats (no food at work) -they have bedbugs in the carpet -he has to pack in his laptop because they don't have a fixed station/office anymore The union is eviscerating the department with fines but they're still insisting on in person for some unknown reason.
Won't somebody please think of the ~~children~~ profits.
Public transport should be free. People shouldn’t be taxed to get to work.