Would criminalizing long commutes improve quality of life?

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen on HN.

Criminalizing makes no sense whatsoever. Treating commute as work time could have interesting consequences, though.

There would be a tremendous reduction in quality of life.

I don't agree with criminalizing long commutes, nor do I agree with the minimum wage, which is a similar overstep from the government into employer-employee relationships. However, I agree with the spirit of both (protecting a worker), and think that an employment contract should be required to state the value of each party's consideration (what they're exchanging).

In other words, an employer should be required to state the forecasted value (measured in profit, updated annually) of the labor they are purchasing. As it stands, very few workers know their value to the company, which severely harms their ability to negotiate. An employee should know how exactly how much a company is profiting from their labor. If this information asymmetry is resolved, I don't think there would be a need for many employment regulations, including minimum wages, or hypothetical restrictions on long commutes, because workers will automatically have a far better negotiating position.

No, all we need are the proper incentives and environments.

Build walkable cities, build office parks next to high-density residential housing and train-stations and do away with tax credits for commuting.

We have something called "Pendlerpauschale" in Austria that grants you tax-credits the longer you have to commute, which incentives people to buy houses in rural, underdeveloped areas. Naturally living in underdeveloped areas comes with a lot of costs all of society has to bear (mostly building and maintaining infrastructure barely anyone uses).

Would outlawing a person’s job improve their quality of life?

What is your goal? Why is that your goal?

Why criminalise long commutes, specifically?

Have you considered other factors which lead to long commutes?

- Low development density.

- Poor transit alternatives: inconvenient locations, intervals, amenities, service hours, costs, transfers, crime, ...)

- Low walkability and bikeability.

- High cost of housing.

- Low personal transportation costs (vehicles, fuel, registration, insurance, parking, maintenance).

- Poor employment options and lack of adoption of remote or flex-time schedules.

- Overly centralised employment and/or manufacturing.

- Numerous economic, political, and cultural dynamics incentivising wasteful and inefficient lifestyles.

In many ways, growth of the private automobile was based on or accelerated these tendencies, sometimes through criminal collusion.[1] During early industrialisation, streetcars and commuter rail (often electrified) extended the reach of towns from a mile or two across to many miles in extant. Commuter rail enabled "bedroom community" suburbs 25--50 miles from downtowns (40--80 km). On-premesis dormatories were also common (and remain so in places such as China), see the Fuggerei in Augsburg, Germany.[2]

Generally, if you want people to do less of some thing, the best way is either to make that thing more expensive, or to make its alternatives less expensive and/or more appealing. COVID-19 did this, in the noneconomic sense of making tightly-packed offices a health risk and remote work through phone, Zoom, and cloud-based computing a more attractive alternative.

Think though what you want to achieve and how you might best get there, though.

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Notes:

1. E.g., the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...>

2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei>

A cleaner policy would be to ban cars. Probably need a transition in between, but that's definitely the destination. In the year 3000 our asses better not be sitting in traffic in single-passenger vehicles w/ 3 seats empty still for some reason.

Why do they need to be criminalized in the first place?

“Long” as in time or distance or expense or something else?

Who would be the criminal? Employee or employer?

Long as in distance or long as in time? If a road is closed so you need to take a detour (either in car or bus) have you committed a crime that morning?

Every now and then I Facebook conspiracy nuts talking about how “15 minute cities” are a way for Big Government to enforce a police state and take away people’s freedom of movement. I always have a good laugh because nobody is actually daft enough to seriously consider using the police to force through an idea that is so squarely meant to be a guide for urban planning. I’d imagine that the fantasy of a police state enforced by commuter limitations is squarely the hobby of that particular conspiracy niche.

Nobody wants a long commute. You know why people do it? Obviously you can think of it if you try for five seconds. Criminalizing commuting blames the victim of the housing crisis.

Here’s a less cruel and weird law that totally solves the problem. When a city permits a company to build a place for a person to work (an office seat for example or a factory job) the city must also permit a house or apartment. Ya know so the person who works there can live there without displacing someone else. Because the guy with the shiny new job can afford an expensive place to live. You know who can’t? The bus driver who hasn’t had a raise in ten years. The librarian. The school teacher. The grocery store checker. They all get pushed further and further away. You think they like waking up at five to get to work by 8?

People commute to Mountain View CA because the city added 30,000 jobs and zero new houses for a decade. Had the city been forced by law to permit the housing it 100% would have gotten built. There was space, there were plans, there were requests. The city did not permit the construction. If you don’t believe me see the vacant lot at 1601 Bayshore pkwy. Zoned for hotel, a vacant muddy lot because nobody wants or needs a hotel there. You know what people want and need? A 50 story dense condo building. You know why it doesn’t exist? Because it is not permitted by the city. (by the way permit is a fun word. Consider for a few moments the two meanings that apply in this case and how they collapse into one)

But never mind, blame the victims.

This is a horrible idea. I have had commutes up to almost 2 hours each way, because my line of work was limited and not at all work from home able. I chose to live in a smaller town, yes. But i dont feel i should be forced to live in a big city with crazy home prices just because my job cant be in a smaller town. Im a professional, and not all professions have offices like mcdonalds have food places. I feel i pay the price enough with gas and tires and brakes.

So if I want to get a better job I have to limit myself to limit myself to work-at-home jobs, or find a job that is not a long commute away, or I have to move?

It sounds like a good way to prevent you from switching to a better job that’s a 16 minute commute.

No. It would make it worse. It would force me to either have a small selection of companies to cost from it force me to move. And what happens if my spouse works in the opposite direction? Long commutes are generally elective. And people generally elect them because they believe they have a better quality of life where they live.

What would really help is making it illegal for companies to deny remote work (except for jobs where physical presence is obviously needed). That way many people wouldn’t have to commute, and those who do could travel much faster with less cars on the roads. And we could all breathe cleaner air and suffer less global warming. That we continue to commute to office jobs is grotesque and evil.

The biggest causes are:

(a) Society not having caught up with the 21st century, where travelling to an office is not longer necessary (we'll get to production factories in a moment)

(b) People wanting to live where everyone else lives for great availability of, well, everything. A recursive problem

If we solved (a), (b) would follow. There's no need for force, it's a solvable problem. It's just that there are entrenched entities that don't want it solved.

As for work that requires physical presence, there are two categories I can think of:

1. Factories. i.e. Places that produce something

2. Retail that caters to people

Again, (2) would be solved after (a). (1) is a small number of people, and doesn't need solving, especially since most factory workers live locally anyway.