How to Kill a Zombie

Traffic in and around big cities is a nightmare. The major cause of this traffic is getting people to and from work. Most of these commuters choose the private car over transit, trains or carpooling; it's simply the easiest and most convenient choice.

However when you consider that you may spend up to 2 hours a day commuting to and from work the reality is shocking. If you commute one hour to work and one hour home over the year that's the equivalent of 13 forty hour work weeks! That's crazy and what's even crazier is that people think it's normal!

To me this is clearly an undesirable and unsustainable situation. People who commute these long distances spend less time relaxing or with their families. And let's not forget all that pollution and wasted fuel.

So today I was thinking: what if your employer was responsible for your commute? They had to pay you for the time you commute to and from work or your eight hour work day would include the two hours spent on the road. What effect would this have?

Most companies would hate to pay out the extra cash for essentially dead time. Looking at it strategically, shortening the commute would be ideal. If an employee just had to walk a city block to get to work then that would only be 5 or 10 minutes that the employer would have to cover. Companies might also be inclined to move closer to rapid transit links such as train stations and LRT lines. Moving employees to remote locations closer to home and telework would become more desirable. I could imagine a wealthy company locating to a small town relatively far away from cities and sprawl and supporting their employees to relocate to the town; they might provide lower mortgage rates or other incentives. Given cheap telecommunications and the Internet this would not be an unreasonable move. The downside would probably be that some towns would change their names to reflect their new dominant resident: Welcome to Nortelville.

There probably wouldn't need to be as much highway construction or expansion which would save us all a lot of money. Pollution would be lessened and therefore there would be a decrease in hospital visits and smog blanketing our cities. People would have more time to live as opposed to being commuter zombies. For businesses, productivity would increase as people would be less drained by their commute.

What's the downside to this scenario? Employees that chose to live in the middle of nowhere would probably be let go if they wouldn't move closer to work. The suburbs would have to change their primarily residential orientation. Living in Hamilton, I doubt many industrial workers would want to live in proximity to their warehouses and factories. On a positive note, this may encourage businesses to be less polluting and more supportive of their surrounding communities. If they didn't then their employees would move away and they'd have to pay out more.

Of course, don't expect our reactive as opposed to proactive governments to study let alone enact this progressive move. Still it sounds pretty good and revolutionary to me. Comments?