San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘WFH’ no planning panacea How working from home could actually make our traffic worse
In a pandemic year filled with untold horribleness, being allowed to skip the office commute and work remotely from home has clearly been an isolated bright spot for many. When The Chronicle asked you to chime in last week on how things should change as COVID19 restrictions wind down, ensuring flexible workfromhome policies stay permanent was easily your most popular response. So obvious was the appeal of this idea, in fact, that not a single person bothered to explain why it was so important.
My inbox saw more eloquent arguments for why sex clubs should open than any justifying the necessity of preserving workfromhome policies. “WFH.”
’nuff said.
I get it. Working from home appears to be an intuitively great idea, and I’m certainly not immune to its charms. Shoes, socks, pants: Over the past year I’ve come to hate them all. Like many, I’ve been quietly clinging to the hope that office workers will get to sit around in their pajamas in perpetuity, begrudgingly throwing on a collared shirt a few times a day when the Zoom bell tolls.
Staying at home isn’t just stress relief for the slovenly, like me. In theory it keeps motorists off the roads, helping to clean up local air pollution and make inroads into meeting California’s ambitious and essential climate goals.
It also has allowed people to live wherever they want — at least during pandemic lockdowns — untethering workers from their offices.
With all this in mind, I reached out to California State Sen. Scott Wiener to see if the prospect of permanent work from home had altered his thinking around ambitious housing plans to densify San Francisco and other jobrich areas. Do we still need dense housing near offices if people are staying home?
“Absolutely,” he said. “If we want to have any chance of meeting our climate goals we do.”
In fact, the movement patterns we’ve seen from remote workers have him more concerned than ever.
“I think we’re about to see more vehicle miles traveled then before COVID.”
That’s because California’s big cities, especially San Francisco, have seen an exodus of residents to the suburbs and to farflung exurbs — places not exactly known for their public transportation options. In addition to city residents fleeing, highly educated, highincome folks are moving into the region, according to the Public Policy Institute. The kinds of people who have no problem buying a house in Marin or Sonoma if they want to.
Bay Area office workers can live wherever they want. And they’re choosing the suburbs.
Suburban life is fundamentally more cardependent. Small trips you’d walk or hop on transit for in the city suddenly become car trips when you’re living in places where there’s no sidewalks and the closest grocery store is 5 miles away. Meanwhile, though city rents took a marginal dip, there still isn’t enough affordable housing for lowerincome workers.
Poverty is being suburbanized, too, a trend that long predates the pandemic.
We’re already seeing the impact on our roads. Things aren’t even fully open yet and vehicle traffic has returned to preCOVID levels in the Bay
Area. Thankfully, rushhour congestion has not. But as schools and businesses begin to open fulltime, it’s not hard to envision a scenario where our roads start to resemble the hellish parking lots that are L.A.’s freeways. Our air quality, too.
In all likelihood, those of us who have been working from home will have to go back to the office sometime soon. Maybe not every day. Maybe only a few days a week. But people will still be on the roads. And they’ll be driving from farflung locations.
What about adapting mass transit to these new migration patterns?
Not going to happen, says San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency head Jeffrey Tumlin.
“Transit agencies do not have the capacity to expand operations into the suburbs.”
Public transit is already on a lifeline. Ridership numbers are down, meaning
fares are, too. Without cash, it’s difficult to maintain regular service. Without regular service, it’s difficult to get ridership where it needs to be to raise fare revenue. A vicious cycle.
Frankly, we’re in an even worse place than we were before the pandemic struck.
All that talk of retrofitting offices and turning them into housing? Not going to happen.
“Law firms were having difficulty finding office space in San Francisco before the pandemic,” Wiener says. “Law firms! The quintessential downtown business. Prices may come down, but there are always going to be businesses who need that space.”
So where does that leave us? In desperate need of solutions.
As a general rule, borrowing transportation ideas from Los Angeles is a dicey affair. But L.A. County had a good one in 2016 when it asked voters for a regional sales tax to cover transportation costs. That revenue stream is not only paying for transit infrastructure construction projects, it’s going toward operating expenses, too, making service less dependent on rider fares.
There’s also the prospect of congestion pricing — which would charge drivers who enter or exit downtown San Francisco during busy rush hour commutes a fee.
If a house in Sonoma is your preference, fine. But you don’t get to clog city streets on the days you do commute without paying a price. That money could then go toward keeping public transit solvent. Lowerincome workers, meanwhile, could be exempted from congestion fees.
Such a plan is in the works, but the earliest San Francisco could adopt a congestion pricing program is likely 2025. And it would need permission from the state to make it happen.
That leaves us right back where we were before the pandemic. We need people to move back to the city. That means dense housing near jobs, and affordable housing for lowincome workers.
Working from home is not going to be the urban planning and climate change panacea that many thought it would be at the start of the pandemic. That doesn’t mean we should just abandon weekday pajamatime. Far from it. We just need to recognize that COVID didn’t rid the world of the rules of equitable and climatefriendly planning.