> What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work.

I don't know. I worry that would immediately become a major form of discrimination -- it would inherently put anyone who was poor/middle-class or anyone with any sort of family/children at a huge employment disadvantage. Large companies would only ever hire already-hyper-wealthy individuals for their main positions (since they are the only people who are ever allowed to live in dense urban places). I'm imagining employers in Seattle saying "We like this guy, but he doesn't live in Pioneer Square where our office is, so that will be a pain, we should pass on him"

Many people already have to deal with that discrimination somewhat in terms of employers only being in major cities. Having that hyper-charged down to just major cities wealthiest neighborhoods seems like an even worse situation.

Yea as someone who has a 2+ hour commute each way, such a policy would doom me to unemployment unless I was willing to take a huge loan and live closer to where the employers are. Good intentions, but bad idea.

I don't think we should take it for granted that it's prohibitively expensive to live in cities. That may be the state of metro areas in North America right now (SF, NYC, Vancouver) but historically this isn't a constant.

Obviously enough economic incentive exists to convince people to spend the time and effort to commute, but if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included.

> if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included.

I agree, and would personally do the same too if possible. But I've watched us artificially inflate property values for literally my entire life. Even in my tiny US Midwest city in the middle of nowhere, city center prices have never been remotely affordable.

We should take it for granted that it's too expensive to live in US/CA/AUS/NZ cities -- because that's the honest truth. That's been the current state for decades, and there's very little chance that any major city center ever becomes affordable again in our lifetimes.

Obviously, we should still try to fix this. I fully support trying. But every facet of our society is wholly dedicated to preventing city centers from ever becoming affordable. Affordable city centers just are not likely to happen. We should not assume regular people live in a situation that doesn't exist, and likely never will.

Making city centers affordable would just require once again turning occupying / owning land into a tax liability rather than a rentier asset that grants you an effective right to tax others.

Rent certainly makes it more affordable to live somewhere until you suddenly never own your home and the rent was higher than the potential mortgage the whole time. I understand home ownership has a lot of hidden costs, but I think the rent situation is a festering cancer preventing the growth of a middle class especially in cities.

There's only so many hyper-wealthy people living close to cities. They already have jobs or have enough money that they don't need jobs. I don't think it's going to be feasible for any company to staff themselves with only hyper-wealthy people.

It's a good idea in principle, but...

Also, you have to remember, in places like the bay area, you can't just pick up and move closer to work. People have enormous incentives to never move: Proposition 13 means you get 5 times lower property taxes by staying put. Not to mention the enormous imbalance between housing and jobs. All the jobs are on the peninnsula and all the housing is in the east bay. All these problems would just be amplified.

I think we're miss-stating the problem. The problem isn't that employers are forcing us to commute long distances with poor company placement. The problem is, we as employees don't have enough power to choose/demand where we want to work. There's simply too much labor supply and too little demand. So, if a worker demands to work remotely, the company can just say: we'll fire this guy and hire one of the countless others willing to commute 2 hours or more.

Just to prove my point: Here in the bay area, companies still place themselves on the penninsula where there's a 4 to 1 ratio of jobs to residential places to live. By that math, they shouldn't be able to hire anyone. And yet, they're having absolutely no problem filling positions, because workers are extremely desperate for money. So desperate, they're willing commute 2 hours or pay 60% of their paycheck to live closer. These are all symptoms of labor oversupply and too little labor demand.

And yet, we keep hearing about a shortage of developers.

In the end, setting aside the distortions caused by minimum wage laws, companies pay for the value they receive from their employees. How you want to apportion that value (hours, widgets, hours [including commuting hours], flexible work arrangements, paid time off, company holidays, etc) doesn't matter much.

As an employer, I'm indifferent between paying someone $50/hour for an 8-hour work day, or $40/hr for an 8-hour workday plus 2 hours of paid commuting.

But you would also be incentivized to locate your office in a more commutable location. In some cases, a slightly higher rent would even make sense to offset the costs of paying people to commute.

Maybe. (In fact, we already care quite a bit about commuting time and ease because we want to retain our developers in a very competitive employment market.)

I think it's more likely that the interview process would just have another step to suss out how much commuting time I'd be paying you for, and then figuring out how to divide up your day rate of $400 (higher in reality, of course) across the buckets. So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day.

> So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day.

You'd have to be careful about that. Employers might end up, in data, showing a negative impact against some protected class (married people, certain races) if they weigh hiring or compensation decisions based on proximity to the office.

It's my understanding that current jurisprudence doesn't require proof of intention to discriminate, just evidence of disparate impact. Single and married people live in different neighborhoods. Different races do as well, depending on the city. Non-heterosexual people tend to cluster in certain neighborhoods, too, for that matter. If a class action suit can show that married people are paid 10% less than single people for equivalent roles, it could be problematic.

Which is all the more reason to make the job the job and the responsibility of getting to the job not [a paid part of] the job.

Not to mention distortions from everything else

If the money goes to the government, then you don't have that problem.

Or at least encourage you to 'start at 10am' and other times, so that 7:30am-9am is not a single solid rush hour.. Spread the traffic over 3-4 hours, and its much nicer for everyone..

In the bay area the morning crush is anywhere between 6:45 and 11:45. I've sometimes tried the "man traffic looks really bad right now and I don't have any meetings in the morning, I'll wait until later to start my commute" and then check again at 10:30 and it's the same _or worse_.

I don't have any particular evidence that this is actually true, instead of just noticing patterns in randomness, but something that feels like it works more often than chance is commuting right after 09:00 or 10:00, on the theory that a significant number of commuters have deadlines on the hour, so traffic might be less immediately after the deadline. It's not completely reliable, so I'm skeptical that it's real, but it also makes a good enough excuse to get me on the road earlier than I would otherwise, so that's nice.

That's what I do. I commute to Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA. I get into the office at 6:30AM every day and leave by 2:30PM. It's still not a lovely commute---maybe 40 to 50 minutes each way---but it's half the time if I were forced to work 9-5. I pay for this with sleep. It's hard for me to get to sleep before 10PM. :-)

I tried that one job. Invariably managers would schedule meetings at 3:00, or someone would come to my desk at 2:15 with a task that just had to be finished that day.

Yeah it only works if people are willing to respect your time (and you're assertive enough to politely remind them when they forget).

Interesting idea.

Regarding the second point: Employees always have an incentive to try to stretch out their tasks, so employers already know how to minimize that behavior. If employers paid for commuting, commuting would be managed like other tasks.

I'm not following. Companies do pay for this. Via salary...

? Hourly workers who live further away dont get paid more.

In effect they do, because nobody would commute if there were a job that paid as much closer to home.

It is not true or everyone's pay would go up or down if they moved locations.

I don't really think you can say that. Labor is not a perfect market.

It's close enough over large groups of people. On average you're going to make more money doing the same thing in SF, for example, than you would in the East Bay.

I wouldn't be comfortable agreeing to that statement.

In addition to the other negatives, there is also personal life considerations. Most people have a significant other who they want to live with long term, who also works. This throws a bunch of complications into the picture that I can't quite figure out.

What if commuting expenses were paid for, but the time spent commuting wasn't?

> What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting?

They already do. I'll take a lower salary from a company that doesn't make me commute.