Are Bay Area commuters willing to give up working from home?

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, nearly one year ago, a 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-year-old 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 the 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.

“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.

PHOTOS BY RAY CHAVEZ — BAY AREA NEWS GROUP Dallas Hartwell plays with his two-year-old daughter Alice Hartwell in the backyard of their home in Vacaville.

Dallas Hartwell draws with his two-year-old daughter Alice Hartwell at their home in Vacaville.