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For a region used to organizing daily life around the rhythms of rush hour, last week was downright eerie.
There was no sea of brake lights at the Bay Bridge toll plaza each morning. No caravan of super-commuters inching west on Interstate 580 before dawn. No sardine-can cramming onto BART trains. No hellacious crawl down Highway 101 at 5 p.m.
As the Bay Area races to contain a deadly pandemic that has upended life as we know it, our region is also being thrust into a mass experiment in remote work. Albeit unintended, we’re seeing firsthand how having large numbers of people do their jobs at home instead of in offices could be a solution to the grinding traffic that captured our attention in the days before COVID-19.
Businesses that may have been hesitant to allow employees to work remotely now have no choice. Workers curious about ditching their commute and working full-time from home are doing just that. According to the transportation analytics firm INRIX, the Bay Area saw a bigger drop in car traffic last week than any other major urban area nationwide.
Whether those habits stick could have big implications for the traffic congestion that fuels climate change while sapping Bay Area residents’ time and money.
“Some people might enjoy this flexibility, and say, ‘Hey, I really like not driving three hours per day,’” said Harvard Business School professor Prithwiraj Choudhury, who studies remote work.
“There could be some managers who say, ‘We actually did pretty well,’” Choudhury added, “or stare at the empty offices and say, ‘Why do we need these offices?’”
Plenty of businesses are still figuring out more pressing day-to-day concerns in this “new temporary normal,” said Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce President Barbara Leslie, and haven’t yet turned their focus to what happens next.
“People are really exploring ways to conduct business as usual while being remote,” Leslie said.
But Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino predicted the temporary change could catch on with some companies and workers, spurring “permanent shifts that will lead to positive impacts on traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emission reductions.”
Telework has become increasingly popular as new technology allows companies to create a workplace anywhere, whether with instant messages on Slack or video conferences using Zoom or GoToMeeting.
Still, only about 5 percent of workers typically do their jobs remotely full-time. That number increases to nearly 25 percent when you include part-time telecommuters — those who work from home one day each week, for instance, or occasionally do so if their child is home sick from school.
Rather than an overnight change once the coronavirus crisis ends, Choudhury foresees a more gradual shift, in which workers gravitate toward companies that offer them the flexibility telework provides, and businesses reap the rewards of lower overhead and a wider pool of talent.
“In 10 years we will see a very different pattern in where people live, and where they work, and how they work,” Choudhury said.
Even a small increase in the number of people working from home could make a big difference on the Bay Area’s roads.
Experts say that’s because “flattening the curve” works for traffic a lot like it does for public health. We get traffic jams because we have too many cars trying to use a limited capacity of road space at the same time. If you get enough drivers to stay off the roads at peak times, either by taking public transportation, adjusting work hours or telecommuting, car volume could stay below the tipping point that creates bad congestion.
“If we increase telecommuting by a comparatively small percentage — let’s say 3 percent — that will create a noticeable difference on our most congested corridors,” like those fearsome stretches of Interstate 80 in the East Bay, said John Goodwin, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
But Goodwin cautioned that the notion this crisis will spur some long-lasting, traffic-solving work-from-home revolution is too simplistic.
For one thing, it’s based on what is almost certainly a faulty premise: That the Bay Area we will eventually return to whenever and however this crisis subsides will look much like it did before efforts to contain the virus began significantly disrupting public life earlier this month.
Since then, thousands of people have lost their jobs or seen their work hours cut as stay-at-home orders force all but essential businesses to close. The stock market is tanking, and experts warn we’re probably headed into a recession.
When the economy is good, more people are driving to jobs and traffic tends to be worse; when it’s bad, fewer people drive to work and highways are clearer.
It’s a trend that has played out in the Bay Area over the past two decades. Traffic congestion here hit a peak in 2000, then dropped with the dot-com bust. It rose to another peak in 2006, then fell with the Great Recession. It has been rising for years since then as a byproduct of a white-hot economy — but nobody knows what’s coming next.
Perhaps the Bay Area’s economy will stay strong through this crisis. And perhaps remote work will stay popular, allowing us to get the best of both worlds — a booming economy without bad traffic — but Goodwin wasn’t betting on it.
“Regional employment and regional congestion are very, very closely linked,” Goodwin said. “Maybe this is the event that unlinks them, but that remains to be seen.”
Even if a permanent shift toward telework takes hold and offers some relief, it still probably won’t amount to a traffic silver bullet, said Brookings Institution Fellow Tracy Hadden Loh, who studies urban life, work and transportation. The traffic problems that have snarled the Bay Area were built over generations, and it will take every solution we’ve got to fix them, Loh said.
“If we really want to quote-unquote ‘fix traffic,’ then what we need is a comprehensive set of reforms,” she said. That means improving public transportation to move people more efficiently, building more housing close to job centers so that people don’t have to commute long distances to begin with, and unwinding public policy that effectively subsidizes private automobiles — all in addition to getting more people to work from home, Loh said.
“Technology is not going to save us,” she said.
