A new (work)day
Free from hours of traffic, some Bay Area commuters got their lives back by working from home. Others did not. What happens next?
For much of the first year of his daughter’s life, Dallas Hartwell barely got to see her during the week. Teaching world history and coaching football at Terra Linda High School in San Rafael meant commuting two hours each way from their home in Vacaville.
“She was asleep when I left the house and she would be in bed by the time I got home,” Hartwell said.
Then, one year ago, the spreading global pandemic erased his commute.
On a recent Friday afternoon rush hour, instead of crawling down a trafficchoked Highway 37, Hartwell was pushing 2-yearold Alice on a backyard swing set.
“Getting to spend time at home and spend time with her, it made me realize how much I missed out,” he said.
Hartwell is among hundreds of thousands of Bay Area commuters who have reclaimed huge chunks of their lives they once spent grinding through some of the worst traffic in the nation after the COVID-19 pandemic spurred a massive shift to remote work.
Now, as they approach a year of measuring their work travel in steps rather than hours, and vaccines point to a near future when a safe return to workplaces will be possible, many are weighing whether they are willing to go back to daily commuting, and others contemplate how it will feel to give that time back.
“When I think about how it felt to be battling
“You feel demoralized. It added to the malaise or stagnation of the COVID situation.” — Lisa Seitz, an office manager who has had to work in person at an accounting firm at the Bishop Ranch campus in San Ramon, who doesn’t own a car and takes BART and a County Connection express bus to work from her home in Oakland
traffic in the dark,” said Helen Hsu, a staff psychologist at Stanford whose commute from Union City often took more than 90 minutes, “that is definitely a sense of dread.”
Hsu does outdoor workouts at her gym now that she’s no longer exhausted from a daily drive across the Dumbarton Bridge.
After wanting a dog for a decade — but never getting one because of their daunting commutes and work travel — Gayathri Somanath and her husband go on walks around their Dublin neighborhood with their Yorkipoo, Kali, who just turned 1.
“I exercise more, I eat better, I have more time with my children,” said Lisa Coyne, another Terra Linda teacher, who lives in Vallejo and used to join Hartwell in the line of cars on Highway 37. “It’s amazing because I’ve never had that.”
Exact figures for how many people are working from home these days are hard to come by, but mobility data from Google shows travel to workplaces in five Bay Area counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara — plummeted by more than 60% last spring and remained down by nearly half through the summer, fall and winter.
As many as 45% of Bay Area jobs, or about 1.8 million positions, are eligible for remote work, according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.
Plenty of people have kept going to their jobs in person, of course. Some have had an easier commute; while traffic congestion has returned to the Bay Area over the past year, the delays are typically less severe and don’t last as long compared to the seemingly endless rush hours before the pandemic, according to data from the traffic analytics firm INRIX.
But those who rely on public transportation often saw their commutes get worse because of service cuts.
“I was very jealous of all these other people making sourdough and staying at home,” said Lisa Seitz, an office manager who has had to work in person at an accounting firm at the Bishop Ranch campus in San Ramon.
Seitz, who doesn’t own a car, takes BART and a County Connection express bus to work from her home in Oakland, a 50-minute trip on a good day before the pandemic. With most riders staying home, BART began running trains less frequently and County Connection temporarily eliminated the express route last spring, meaning Seitz had to take a torturously slow local route. The express was eventually restored, but for months Seitz’s commute grew to 90 minutes or more each way.
“You feel demoralized,” Seitz said, recalling how it felt to nearly double her commute time. “It added to the malaise or stagnation of the COVID situation.”
While many remote workers recognize they’re privileged to not have to commute these days, their time hasn’t been all baking projects and free time.
Parents are having to balance their jobs with helping keep their kids on track with remote learning. In one survey of former commuters, those who were parents estimated they spend 11% of the time they saved looking after their kids.
The biggest chunk of time came from jobs themselves: The same survey found former commuters spend another 35% of the time they gained back doing more work. In interviews, one of the few things Bay Area commuters said they missed about their daily trips was the mental break it created between home and office life.
“By the time I was home I had shut off from work,” said Somanath, the new dog owner, whose commute to San Jose could take four hours round trip on a bad day.
Now, she said, “I have to consciously go outside or shift into dinner-cooking mode because you could just sit in your home office and keep working.”
While some telecommuters may never return to workplaces, more are likely to be like Somanath, a vice president at the e-commerce fraud protection firm Signifyd, who said she expects to go back to the office a couple of days each week to have time with her team.
“One thing we’ve learned is there’s absolutely no reason people have to be in the office five days a week,” Somanath said.
Some of the region’s biggest employers have reached the same conclusion: Salesforce announced in February that two-thirds of its employees will only need to come to the office one to three times each week, while Facebook and Google are moving toward similar hybrid models.
“If I only have to do it once or twice a week, that’s not a big deal,” said Carolyn Crandall, who commuted about an hour each way from the southern edge of San Jose to her job at Attivo Networks, a Fremont cybersecurity company that plans to bring employees back part-time.
Others don’t have as much of a choice.
Hsu, the Stanford psychiatrist, wants to go back to seeing patients in person when it’s safe to do so, though she said she will try to get more administrative work done at home to minimize her commute days.
Hartwell and Coyne, meanwhile, are already back to commuting five days per week.
Terra Linda will welcome students for in-person learning Tuesday, so teachers are going to school to set up their classrooms and battling the traffic that has returned to Highway 37.
“Just the thought that everything is going to change and I’m going to be in the car for two, three, four hours per day; I feel anxious,” Coyne said soon before her commute resumed. “I’ll have no time.”
“I exercise more, I eat better, I have more time with my children. It’s amazing because I’ve never had that.” — Lisa Coyne, a Terra Linda teacher who lives in Vallejo and faced a line of cars every day on Highway 37 before the pandemic