Volume ramps up on the southbound 405 Freeway in Long Beach during a recent afternoon commute.

By Erik Skindrud, InfoWise.org

Remote work can cut traffic congestion, reduce CO2 and other pollutants, and eliminate stressful commutes for American workers. Multiple other advantages stem from the concept too.

Traffic congestion adds an $88 billion penalty to the U.S. economy each year, according to one estimate. That includes more than $11 billion for New York and $8 billion for the Los Angeles metropolitan areas.

What if a method existed for reducing this waste — along with meeting statewide greenhouse gas targets for the year 2035?

That was the aim of a plan drafted by the San Francisco Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission, or MTC. In October 2020, the group unveiled a policy mandating three days’ remote work each week for employees at larger businesses. Citing the pandemic’s “significant shift” toward telework — and a “more affordable, connected, diverse, healthy and vibrant Bay Area” — the planners added the strategy to Plan Bay Area 2050, the region’s comprehensive planning document.

If implemented, municipalities around the globe might have reproduced it. You can guess how the plan fared, however — given recent battles at Apple, Tesla and other big employers.

It was shot down from multiple directions.

Mayors of San Francisco and San Jose issued a joint statement, saying the plan would decimate downtown businesses. BART cried foul — saying increased work-from-home would undermine the transit line’s revenue stream. Remote-work-adverse Google sent an “employee” to complain at a public hearing.

Close to three quarters of Bay Area residents endorsed the plan, however, a MTC poll found.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf backed it too, saying pandemic-driven change opened “an opportunity to do things that could not have been done in the past.” 

The outcome is familiar on the pro-environment and consumer-protection landscapes, however. Recall the opposition when California nudged the world with seat belt and catalytic converter mandates. Predicted auto industry downturns never materialized.

Corporate opposition is skilled at turning pro-environment ideas into “taboo topics,” Columbia University ecologist Shahid Naeem noted in a 2020 BBC interview. Naeem wasn’t speaking about remote work, but any change that curtails “first-world consumption” for the affluent.

A deep dive into work-from-home shows it’s no silver bullet — but a promising tool in an expanding toolbox. Work-from-home advocates need to know the policy’s strong and weak points to argue convincingly in its favor.

Many who experienced the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games recall the success planners achieved in tamping down rush-hour congestion during the two-week event.

During the pre-Games planning period, Patricia Mokhtarian joined the Southern California Association of Governments to evaluate whether “teleworking” might play a role in the Olympic plan. Today a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech University, Mokhtarian is a prominent expert on telework. She received notice in the June 2021 New York Times story, “A Little More Remote Work Could Change Rush Hour a Lot.”

Mokhtarian’s view of the topic is nuanced and complex.

Air travel to meetings just four times a year “could exceed the carbon footprint of daily commuting by vehicle on the ground,” she cautioned in a May 2021 interview with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Still, Mokhtarian remains “convinced that, for the most part, teleworking is an environmentally beneficial strategy.”

“There are many excellent reasons to promote teleworking,” the professor told InfoWise.org. “From the employee’s perspective, these include potentially better work-life balance, lower stress, higher productivity, and broader job opportunities. From the employer’s perspective, advantages include a broader talent pool, potentially greater productivity, and potential real estate savings, etc.”

The Georgia-based academic is less bullish on the notion that remote work can slash rush-hour congestion on roadways. A lot remains unknown too, she emphasizes.

“Congestion has been around at least since the Roman Empire,” she notes.

Another PhD thinks remote work can take a significant bite out of rush hour, however.

“It’s an interesting and very promising area of study,” said Giovanni Circella of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. “Even 10 percent of commuter trips disappearing due to remote work has a significant effect on traffic congestion.

“The biggest effect is on travel during the peak times — especially the morning commute,” Circella told InfoWise.org. “There’s less of an impact on afternoon traffic. Even if people work from home, they want to run errands. They don’t want to be chained to their desks all day.”

One study of post-pandemic traffic projects that a full 20 percent of the workforce will stay remote on any given day — double Circella’s example. The 2021 report, “Why Working From Home Will Stick,” is published by the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute.

Sources for this article say plenty is unknown about how remote work will ultimately integrate into society, however.

“High gas prices are now affecting demand for travel,” Circella noted. “It’s difficult to distinguish the exact impacts of the pandemic on travel from other concurring phenomena.”

Anyone concerned with climate, the environment or related issues might consider learning more about work-from-home and becoming an advocate.

Building a campaign will require the best evidence — and narratives powerful enough to outcompete parties with narrow interests — and deep pockets.

A consensus is forming among experts that telecommuting will form part of a strategy to mitigate the overall crisis in transit — the fact that we can’t build our way out of traffic congestion.

Thankfully, work toward regional initiatives continues — like the recent Southern California Association of Governments / Caltrans study on expanding broadband internet to support work-from-home and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled. (It also aims at the digital divide that penalizes students in low-income neighborhoods.)

Political momentum for the California broadband proposal may already have stalled, however, due to campaign contributions from AT&T and other internet service providers.

It’s time to get to work on remote work. The first thing the movement needs is well-funded advocacy and consistent messaging.

The argument is powerful enough — it just needs to be heard.