> most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns.

Does it? Work-related travel is mostly during morning and late afternoon, but public transit also runs outside those hours. In my experience public transit works quite well for non-commuting travel. Of course this can vary wildly by country, but the claim that public transit only really serves commuters is not universally true.

It is always partially true, but each city is different. People who travel in the very early hours (like 2:30am) always have problems, (even the best cities run reduced and thus inconvenient service for maintenance reasons, most give up on transit completely). While those hours are not common it is safe to bet everyone reading this has had reason to travel at those times at least one night in their life.

In far too many cities, (and not just in the US) additional service is run during the peaks. By additional service I mean they run more buses/trains as opposed something with more seats (that is longer). This means people who travel at non-peak hours have to be careful about when they travel to ensure there is service without waiting. Of course if the wait is still less than 5 minutes nobody cares, but as waits get longer - humans don't have time for that.

giant office buildings also have a giant impact. Those resources could have been homes or extra rooms to work from.

then there is the whole fast food and fast everything along the road and various industries that busy themselves with appearance.

I wish we used the same logic for roads/streets as well. Except for toll roads, which only get a partial subsidy, roads are fully subsidized by the taxpayer.

Since others get fully subsidized roads for their private vehicles, I argue public transit should be fully subsidized as well.

If people are mainly working from home then we can redirect public transit from business parks or whatever towards places people still want to go (e.g. shopping, nightlife, events) but without a car. Starving already often underfunded public transit is not the answer.

Why not use the hundreds of millions spent on highways to subsidize people to work from home instead? Most commuters in North America are not using public transit but highways.

I do manual labor but i could/should/might be a software developer. Not sure, im definitely not going to give up what i have to relocate. Give me work/tasks and we will see i havent got what it takes or do and if the pay and stability is there to give up what i have for it. They already cant find people. Reduce it further and salaries will have to change.

Because if they promote it too much, they people move far away and the city loses the tax base. One extreme example is New York City -- they have a 3.5% income tax. If you move into next-door NJ or CT, the city loses that 3.5% income.

And once telecommuting is common in a given company, the workers begin to disperse, first to "driving distance" and then to "anywhere in a reasonable timezone".

We already saw how badly Covid hit city centers, perpetual work-from-home would be worse; causing a mini-Detroit in many cities.

Currently, when we see recession, we can increase government spending. This is usually done in infrastructure – we give people a job, and in return we get infrastructure, nice!

But if we agree that infrastructure does not provide that amount of value we either need to figure other large scale projects that 1) provide value and 2) requires a lot of manual labor or we need to not found money distribution in work (an alternative could be UBI here).