Earth Day 2020: Looking forward to a cleaner, happier post-commuting world

This was the view on a recent 8 a.m. westbound crossing of the 520 floating bridge on Lake Washington in Seattle. Typically at 8 a.m., 7,000 vehicles would be on this bridge at once, and it normally carries 78,000 cars a day. Also in the photo: Improved air quality provides a clear view of the Olympic Mountains. 

 

We love driving, and as Autoblog readers, obviously you do too. But there is pleasurable, fulfilling driving — tooling down country backroads, or seeing the USA in your Chevrolet — and there is stupid driving. Otherwise known as commuting.

You’ve surely had that thought. “This is stupid” has crossed your mind while you plodded along the same route to work and back for years, like a pony carving a rut giving kiddie rides at a county fair. While sitting in stop-and-go traffic. While spending a lost fortune on gasoline and wearing out entire cars trapped in this loop. All to service a job to get a check to afford the machinery to go back out and do it again.

But on this Earth Day, there’s hope for weary travelers to nowhere. The coronavirus pandemic has taken so much from us: loved ones, jobs, our sense of security, our freedom to move about. And it has changed so much, both in the short term until a vaccine is developed and herd immunity is built up, and in lasting ways. Businesses are talking about how they’ll get things done in the post-pandemic world, and it seems we may finally be at the tipping point for the not-so-great American commute.

A lot of companies and managers before the pandemic still viewed working from home with suspicion — despite many studies showing that people working from home are vastly more productive, not less. Think about it: You work a full day, you’re not late because your commute took 30 seconds from coffee pot to desk, you don’t have to leave early to beat traffic, some of the time you formerly spent in the car invariably winds up as time on the job, and you want to appear to appear effective so you tend to go the extra mile. (More metaphorical miles, fewer odometer miles.)

Yet before the pandemic hit, only 4.7 million Americans, or 3.4% of the population, were regularly working from home. 

It took coronavirus lockdown orders — work from home or don’t work at all — for many companies to set aside their misgivings. But now that widespread WFH has happened, we likely will never go back to the way we were.

For one thing, the lockdowns forced companies to hurry up and invest in VPNs and other IT infrastructure to support remote work — money they hadn’t planned to spend for many more years. Now that the technology is there, they’ll want to get more than a few weeks’ worth of ROI on it.

For another, “the cat is out of the bag.” That’s what Greg Caplan, co-founder of the program Remote Year, told Fast Company recently.

“Coronavirus is going to expose more people to working remotely than ever,” he told the magazine. “Most people will see that it is very possible and start to grow accustomed to the benefits of [remote work], including autonomy, no commute, and less distractions than open offices. Companies that don’t allow remote work already are going to have to continue supporting it going forward, now that they have proven to themselves that it works.”

Kate Lister, president of consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics, told Recode that the virus made companies see the light — because even the bosses were having to work from home.  Remember that 3.4% WFH figure we mentioned earlier? A new MIT report says that 34% of Americans are now working from home — that’s a tenfold increase, and is every worker for whom it’s possible. Lister predicts that 30% of the U.S. workforce will be remote multiple days per week when the coronavirus crisis has passed.

Even if companies are reluctant to support WFH after everything we’ve been through, this experience has changed workers’ expectations forever. Who would want to take a job now for a company that forbids remote work? Just as employees expect other benefits or working conditions, they’ll have this new expectation. Workplaces will encourage remote work, or lose recruits to others that do.

There are many other reasons why working from home is here to stay and commuting will be changed forever. Just a few:

• Lower overhead … and better pay?: It’s not like we’ll never go to an office again. There are team-building and strategic benefits to occasionally touching base with co-workers face-to-face, so a likely model going forward will be a hybrid — with people working from home some days and coming into an office once or twice a week. The buzzwords for this are “activity based working,” “agile space,” and what Accenture calls the “Elastic Digital Workplace.” Offices may dispense with acres of cubicles, so a company can spend far less on real estate. That means more money for shareholders — or even better, for the now-more-productive workers’ salaries. 

• Diversity in time, space, people: Freed from the demands of proximity, workers can be anywhere or anybody. Brands can take advantage of time zone differences, and employees can come from many backgrounds and nationalities. (We’ve seen these benefits here at Autoblog, where we have staff across the U.S. time zones and contributors in Europe.)

• Remote workers are healthier: They take fewer sick days and maintain better work-life balance.

• Other commuters: Obviously this entire conversation applies only to those whose work can be produced via computer keyboard. Much of the American workforce will still have to show up to a workplace for manufacturing, service jobs or other hands-on or public-facing work. But for them, there will still be benefits. The roads will be less crowded. And maybe employers, having seen the WFH experiment work, will see the efficacy of flexible schedules or four 10s.

• Oil companies and car companies: We’ve seen what reduced demand has done to Big Oil. Gas prices are plunging, and crude futures fell into negative territory for the first time in history. Nothing’s for certain in the convoluted world of the oil market, but lower demand could help keep prices at the pump in check in the years to come. Americans before the pandemic burned almost 400 million gallons of gasoline per day, and if a third of us are no longer doing a daily commute, it’ll be a boon for consumers and the planet — just not for the oil companies. The same might be said for automakers and vehicle prices, as our cars will simply last longer. Neither industry is going to be happy with our liberation from the tyranny of the commute.

• The environment: Let’s bring this essay back around to Earth Day. We’ve seen the images of the dramatic, near-instant positive effect the coronavirus lockdowns have had on air quality — and the equally quick return to dirty air when the lockdown was eased in China. Smog stopped choking New Delhi, one of the most polluted cities in the world, and India’s getting views of sights not visible in decades. Nitrogen dioxide pollution in the northeastern United States is down 30%. Rome air pollution levels from mid-March to mid-April were down 49% from a year ago. Stars seem more visible at night.

The past few weeks have allowed us to see how quickly and positively the planet might respond if we can get serious about addressing climate change. The air from Boston to Washington is its cleanest since a NASA satellite started measuring nitrogen dioxide in 2005, says NASA atmospheric scientist Barry Lefer.

“We’re getting a glimpse,” Lefer says, “of what might happen if we start switching to non-polluting cars.”

The lockdown “is giving us this quite extraordinary insight into just how much of a mess we humans are making of our beautiful planet,” says conservation scientist Stuart Pimm of Duke University. “This is giving us an opportunity to magically see how much better it can be.”

Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.

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