I actually don't know the answer to this question and what baffles me the most is hearing what urban/transport activists have to say about that - those I talked with either ignore it completely or argue that it's worse because it "induces sprawl".
I have quite a few people in my social circle who moved out to the suburbs/countryside and remote work was by and large considered only after they moved and found that they underestimated what an issue their commute would be(especially when traffic increased over time as it usually does).
Personally I live in the city and still work remotely because it's more convenient than travelling to work daily regardless how close to the workplace I might live.
> I talked with either ignore it completely or argue that it's worse because it "induces sprawl".
But, sprawl is only a problem because of commutes. If you had sprawl with lots of small, local commercial outlets, then that's just perfect. No long commutes to work and no long commutes to get life's necessities.
> But, sprawl is only a problem because of commutes.
I agree to an extent.
To be completely fair it is less efficient than densely packed cities in terms of energy and cost of providing services like sewage/garbage disposal.
That being said I see it as a tradeoff like any other and believe people should have the right to choose how they live as long as they bear the costs of that.
100% with you on that. I live 4km from the city centre, so essentially walking distance.
I went there on the weekend. It's very lively, but I wouldn't want this sort of liveliness during the evening when the only thing I need is to wind down. I prefer living here, halfway from the centre to the city limits.
Even if you stop moving people, you still have to move goods (and electricity, and sewage) which is less efficient if the people are spread over a larger area.
> Even if you stop moving people, you still have to move goods (and electricity, and sewage) which is less efficient if the people are spread over a larger area
That's not necessarily true. Centralizing leads to congestion, for instance, to say nothing of the other failure modes of centralizing (single point of failure being the big one). I expect there is an optimal density for each of those, and it's not clear that "large city" is in that region.
Losses in distributing electricity are fairly negligible, and distributed generation should be encouraged for some of the same reasons.
The goal of remote work is not to drive everyone out of the city. It's a success if we allow enough people to move to the suburbs. Everyone benefits, including people that love the city life.
Plus, remote work is still not the norm in every company, so it's difficult for someone like you and me to move to the suburbs even if we wanted to, because we can't be 100% certain our next jobs will be remote.
> Everyone benefits, including people that love the city life.
That's what I've been saying, but I'm met with an attitude that doesn't accept anything short of what I see as a human pile-up with only the very rich owning real estate.
I have quite a few people in my social circle who moved out to the suburbs/countryside and remote work was by and large considered only after they moved and found that they underestimated what an issue their commute would be(especially when traffic increased over time as it usually does).
Personally I live in the city and still work remotely because it's more convenient than travelling to work daily regardless how close to the workplace I might live.