Is density or the huge highway required? We're commuting to a huge number of white collar jobs completely unnecessarily. Move information, not people.
So much property value is tied up in this assumption we need to be close to jobs to work and it's all a lie. Many of the jobs that do require an in-person presence are only located where they're located because the assumption is the jobs need to be there to serve the workers who don't need to be there in the first place. I don't think any part of how we're making cities actually makes sense, because they're designed for the world of 2020, and not the world of 2030.
People have this mindset that's outmoded, they think about how to get the workers into offices. The thought now should be how to get goods and services to the workers.
Density appears to be required because letting people do remote work causes them to live in cities /even more/. When they do spread out, it doesn't encourage low density, but rather even far out places like Spokane become unaffordable.
Besides that, low density suburbia is a very artificial post-WW2 invention, traditional villages were dense enough.
Indeed so; I've been to small towns in western Poland which are many centuries old, and they are pretty dense, sometimes downright tight. I've been to a number of small towns in Ireland and England, and they look properly urban, nothing like suburban sprawl.
As a software engineer, I work from home, and it's OK. Living in a dense city means I can walk to a park, or a grocery store, or a to my doctor, but it's a just a nice bonus.
But the article is talking about factories, blue-collar jobs that require actual physical presence.
Factory jobs are a small fraction of the overall economy. Take the white collar cars off the road and you've freed up capacity. Then build roads for industrial purposes.
I do some work with blue collar industrial clients now and again as a favour. I work remote and contract out the various things I can't do remotely to an MSP or various local installers. A factory has an accounting department, it has managers pushing paper all day (although these usually can only be hybrid remote positions), that sort of thing.
You certainly need to build a freaking road to the facility and arrange for the transport of workers but honestly congestion on these roads isn't as much as an issue as disrepair and maintenance because of the heavy trucks driving across them. Talk to anybody running anything industrial and they want to hire some white collar people to automate some stuff to either cut labor costs or expand the business, hopefully the latter, and these people are likely to work hybrid.
I guess you are right and I should give more consideration to industrial uses of transportation infrastructure which are just as relevant as ever.
So much property value is tied up in this assumption we need to be close to jobs to work and it's all a lie. Many of the jobs that do require an in-person presence are only located where they're located because the assumption is the jobs need to be there to serve the workers who don't need to be there in the first place. I don't think any part of how we're making cities actually makes sense, because they're designed for the world of 2020, and not the world of 2030.
People have this mindset that's outmoded, they think about how to get the workers into offices. The thought now should be how to get goods and services to the workers.