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So you want the entire world to be forced to live in equivalents of Manhattan, or ideally, Kowloon Walled City?
Also, you say you're against people driving to work, but the other potential consequence is that people in medium density cities are going to be told that they're no longer allowed to walk to work.
Look, population density in general is good. Forcing it by telling employers they're now both allowed AND encouraged to discriminate employees based on where they live is going to have so many unintended consequences there's no point in even entertaining the thought. If they're not allowed to discriminate, people are going to intentionally move far enough away to have a 4 hour commute each way.
There's no winning here, the only way to make things better is to lobby for better zoning laws if you live in a country where those commonly prevent high-rises or mixed-use neighborhoods. That benefits everyone, regardless of whether they want to live in an apartment smaller than a standard shipping container, a luxury penthouse, or in the suburbs.
If you want maximum density, you need cities to be built from the ground up like they do in China. START with the skyscrapers, instead of building them when enough people live there for there to be demand.
I don't really believe private car ownership should even be allowed and should be replaced entirely by either dense cities where we can walk to our jobs or public transit, preferably trains. That way we can still have small towns, but you have to take the train now.
Ultimately you're right, the only way to make things better is using central planning like they do in China. There is no market reform that can save us.
That doesn't change the fact that commuting should be considered part of your job. You can't work without it.
Unless you work remotely,! Oh look, another thing that would be incentivized by paying people for their commutes.
Okay, so you're for completely tearing up all rural communities and abolishing farms, I can dig that. What about people who get mental health issues from living in the concrete jungle though?
Then there's people like me. I work as a software engineer, but can't work at home for shit. Too many distractions. However, if I started commuting to work in this proposed system, my employer would have to pay me the same for fewer hours spent on the actual work, or pay more for the same amount of hours, just because it takes me half an hour to walk to work and half an hour to walk back home as I live pretty far from the city center. I imagine I'd be told to fuck off if I wanted to go to the office. Okay, technically all this no longer applies because I'm now working for myself at home (which has been a bit of a mistake), but it would have applied a few months ago.
Also what about factories and such? They often pollute, so it's actually better if you have them a slight distance away from major population centers. But if they have to start paying for peoples' commutes, you'd have to have them in-between apartment buildings to save money.
No, I did say that we can have trains.
I live in Iowa, we also have a shuttle program that transports ag workers without cars. The farm to market routes are perfectly usable for shuttles (basically they're like small buses and large taxies)
We can actually abolish private car ownership without forcing everyone to live in the concrete jungle (although I think many of the issues caused by cities could be addressed by better and safer infrastructure, I recognize cities can be overstimulating for some people).
So under the current system you are having an hour stolen from you every day because of the commute. That's unpaid labor! Commuting is actual work! You have to do it for your job, that means it's work.
You're essentially saying "my employer needs to be able to steal labor time from me to make me employable" and that's a serious problem.
Factories can be much cleaner than they have been, but zoning laws take care of this. Factories would like to not have to pay for longer commutes, but that's too bad because the city won't let them build inside of neighborhoods. Also, the shuttle program here in Iowa also transports factory, warehouse, and meat packing workers.
Look either the employer has to pay for the commute or the government does, but either way we need to incentivize shorter commutes and we need to pay workers for the time stolen from them by their commutes.