A friend linked to “Bay Area Traffic Up 70 Percent In 6 Years” from her Facebook status. She is a nurse who commutes from the East Bay to the city. Here’s what she said: “Leaving at 0510 these days to hit the bridge before major back ups! Still taking about 45-55 mins for the 22 mile trek.”
Would it make sense to let the big employers build high-rise dorms right next to their offices? (Right now that wouldn’t be possible, presumably, due to zoning restrictions.) So Facebook would have a 30-story tower in place of a current parking lot. Just imagine how many cars could be taken off the road if every company had dorms big enough for at least half of the employees (might not work that great for workers with children, but most of these firms seek to hire primarily the young and childless).
> Would it make sense to let the big employers build high-rise dorms right next to their offices?
No zoning laws = Houston, where people can build an oil refinery next to a school, next to a shooting range, next to an apartment building!
If we were serious about relaxing zoning laws, the model used by some European cities should be considered: land can only be rezoned when owned by the govt (prevents corruption thru lobbying, gives windfall profits to public vs speculators). Eg: city buys parking lot for $X, city rezones it for residential use, city sells it to builder for $3X.
I think more ferries would be good, too.
We’ve got low-latency broadband internet connections, cheap cameras that capture video at a quality that would’ve been out of range for professional grade equipment fifteen years ago, and immersive VR technology at reasonable prices.
Corporate bureaucracy has increased to the point that most people spend their working day either in meetings or entering stuff into a computer. Both of which you can do from anywhere in the world.
Nurses, like the one in your example, excepted, why do people keep showing up at the office?
Why bother building dorms? They can just use their existing parking lots.
“Would it make sense to let the big employers build high-rise dorms right next to their offices? ”
Yes.
It would also make more sense for companies to allow their employees to telecommute more often, as michiel points out. But actually the reason I think you don’t see more telecommuting is that most office jobs now are make-work jobs (or “bullshit jobs” as David Graeber put it). They don’t really need the work to get done. Having a bunch of people show up each morning and go to diversity training is the whole point.
However, even if the point above is true, this could still be done by having people live in dorms next to the office. You still have people physically go to the office in this system. In fact managing the dorms creates even more opportunities for make-work, as anyone who has been the armed services (or a prison) can tell you.
Another thing the dorms allow is for people to spend their weekends in a completely different city than the company they work for is located. You could have a couple living, or at least spending their weekends together, in Pittsburgh but one half works in New York and the other half in Chicago or something like that. This wouldn’t work so well after they had children, but it would work for may couples. A single person could live in Florida and work in Atlanta. It would greatly expand the employment market.
This post reminds me of the movie I watched not too long ago: “High-Rise” [1]. Watch it, it could answer your question.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(film)
They could just pay enough for workers to afford living where their jobs are. Something so preposterous used to be normal.
Here is an idea:
We could have the workers mostly working in skyscrapers in a densely occupied part of the city called “downtown”. Then, we could have outlying areas of the city for residential use. These could be called “uptown” or “the suburbs”. In order to connect workers with their jobs, we could lay down metal rails and string a bunch of buses together to run on those rails and propel them with electricity. We could call these “trains”. If some of the trains ran underground in tunnels we could call these a “subway”. Every morning, all the workers (we could call them “commuters”) would board a train or subway and ride “downtown” to their offices and then at the end of the day they would do the reverse. I’m not sure if this would work, but I have a gut feeling that it might.
How are you going to fire someone? Throw him and his family on street?
Jack –
When was that? In the good old days?
In Japan, many large companies have dormitories for young, unmarried workers. Bay Area traffic has indeed gotten much worse. Increased population, very low increase in housing near jobs, and unchanged highway capacity adds up to a lot of traffic jams, particularly in the South Bay.