Only 1 second at 504,000kph

Only a few milliseconds at the speed of light. We could eliminate the problems of traffic, infrastructure, energy, and housing costs if we could only agree that forcing everyone to meet in the same place at the same time is no longer necessary for most work.

Is it really just a matter of getting people to agree, or do people work more effectively face-to-face?

Google, Apple, Facebook all have the means to afford any possible telecommuting technology, yet they also bus their employees 40 miles south from San Francisco to the office.

I have no doubt that telecommuting works well for some teams and some employees, but does it work well in the general case?

I don't think that encouraging spread out housing in large homes on large pieces of land is going to solve any energy problem. People still need to go out for food, errands, entertainment, etc. And single family homes in general are less water and energy efficient than more high density housing.

Unless we move to more walking and transit friendly cities with denser mixed use housing.

Traffic is a by product of the single family detached home and lack of transit options.

>Traffic is a by product of the single family detached home and lack of transit options.

That's a small part of it. Traffic is also a byproduct of increased population, jobs consolidating into a few large cities, in the US, middle America jobs going outside the border (gotta move to cities), requiring workers to be in the office, even when it's mostly unnecessary, and probably plenty I'm missing.

> Traffic is also a byproduct of increased population, jobs consolidating into a few large cities

There are plenty of large cities in the world where most people have reasonable (e.g. <30m each way on transit) commutes.

The problem with the US is that the infrastructure and regional/urban planning is largely designed to only support low-density development, with unscalable and extremely space-inefficient car transportation for every trip, so when population goes up beyond the capacity of key bottleneck roads everyone is screwed.

If you instead build subways, BRT, pedestrian friendly streets, and both office space and medium-density housing near transit corridors, then scaling is much easier by just adding more frequent trains/buses.

Unfortunately, it does not really work.

* The denser the area, the slower the transportation (by any mean).

* People in dense areas spend more time commuting than people in sparse areas.

* When you upgrade the infrastructure making transportation faster, people move farther, keeping their commuting time constant.

It's just that packing people around the same area is not a very good idea, whichever way you do it; there is no true solution to the problems it causes.

The problem with that is that large metros in general have dramatically healthier job markets. If your choice is either (a) live in a sparsely populated place with no job at all but not much traffic, or (b) move to the affordable outskirts of a metro area with a hellish commute, a sizable proportion of people end up choosing b.

There isn’t really a “good idea” alternative to packing people around the same area; higher density is dramatically more cost-efficient for providing the same quality of public services and infrastructure and the same kinds of employment opportunities.

The question then becomes: if n people are going to live in the metro area, where someone in any nearby housing might plausibly work at any nearby job, what is the most convenient and effective way of organizing the space? The answer is: put a high density of housing and jobs directly next to transit corridors, so that many people can find work within a reasonable commute from their house (or can find housing within a reasonable commute from their jobs) without creating traffic bottlenecks. If instead you follow the LA model where density is mostly uniformly low, and commuting is via low-bandwidth freeways, then what you end up with is people living 2 hours from downtown and leaving home at 4 AM every day to beat the traffic, and other people stuck crawling down the highway twice a day.

Why do you think that the transportation speed is inversely related to density? I can ride my bike at approximately the same speed in the city as I can in the countryside. It's just that in the city I can reach anything I need within 30 minutes.

This might be true for a particular city depending on population density and commute habits of the people, but after a certain population density is reached the premise that transportation speed is inversely proportional to density holds true for the most part. Fixed line transport such as trains may not be directly affected by the density but there may be a bottleneck if the density is sufficient to saturate the lines. If the trains are running full - this would lead to increase in wait times and longer commute time.

If you fill your whole city with 30+ story high rises and subways are overwhelmed even when running cars every 1-2 minutes (e.g. some Chinese cities), you can definitely create a bottleneck at the subway during commute hours. That's very high density we are talking about though.

Increased housing population would not cause traffic if it was connected to work in a way that did not cause traffic.

It is demonstrated at this point that sprawl results in traffic pretty quickly, while dense cities with good public transit have a much smaller commute time (e.g. NY, London).

In places like Manhattan you could walk to work on Manhattan, so other types of transit is a convenience rather than a necessary.

With divorce at the levels it is, single families often occupy 2 homes.

> Traffic is a by product of the single family detached home and lack of transit options.

I think you mean “symptom”. The root cause is corporate refusal to spread out and use some of the wide open space in between the coasts.

Large cities in Europe have (comparatively) few detached homes and plenty of transit options, yet traffic can still be terrible because the road infrastructure is less huge. I guess we need american roads in european cities, but I'm afraid it's too late for that.