How Cheap is Your Commute?

NEW YORK - MARCH 09: Commuters wait for the s...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Commuting from a nice, sterile suburb to the rough, exciting city where a lot of people work and play is kind of the ultimate dream of a lot of different people. At one point in history, taking on the use of a car granted people a level of freedom to move around that they had never been able to enjoy before. But in this day and age, where a couple of hundred houses may have nothing around them for miles in any direction but only have tiny individual plots of land apiece, one starts to wonder at the level of freedom this really provides for anyone. Without public transportation, a car becomes a necessity, after all.

And precisely how free can an individual be, when their very livelihood is predicated upon not only having a job, but also having their car so that they can get to their job. Without a backup plan, the illusion of freedom is a shadow behind which indenturing stays only slightly hidden. The car, which looks like a shiny steed of mobility and the capacity to go “wherever you want” becomes a prison of its own, due to construction, traffic, and the fact that more and more of a person’s day is bound to be consumed by the tedious act of going further and further from their exurb to or from whatever they actually want to do.

While the immediate feeling of a car is that it is cheap, available freedom to go wherever you want, this feeling is erroneous for more than just the fact that you may only go where the road allows you to go. You are also constrained on the affordability front. Have you ever stopped to crunch the numbers on what a car costs? Everybody knows what the monthly payment on their car is (unless they’ve paid it off), but how much money are you shelling out through interest? How much is insurance really costing you over the years? And when you add in gas, the occasional tire that needs changing, oil and other maintenance, cars are not so cheap.

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How Responsible are you for Your Employee’s Commutes?

Timbuk2 Commute
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Everybody knows that a business is legally responsible for the amount of greenhouse gases it emits as a direct result of its operations. If you have a factory, a retail store or a distribution center, that center most likely uses some degree of fossil fuels to do what it needs to do. And by extension, it uses electricity (which often comes from fossil fuels) and heat (which is even more likely to be fossil fuel based). These emissions are difficult to control, and will be even more difficult to get rid of entirely, when the law inevitably declares that fossil fuels may never be used again. Of course, by that point, a gallon of gasoline will probably be over $1,000 due to a rather acute level of scarcity on the supply side.

But beyond the obvious sources of greenhouse gases, there is another. It is known as Scope 3 (as opposed to the other two Scopes), and it concerns all satellite aspects of a company. If your suppliers produce greenhouse gases because they work with you, you are essentially producing these gases by proxy. And if your employees have to commute to and from work (as most employees do), you may eventually be held accountable for the greenhouse gases which they produce in the process. As your employees commute back and forth to and from work, they may be emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases; and it’s all because of your business, after all.

How accountable are you for your employees? Is it their responsibility to seek out low emission or zero emission methods of commuting, such as using public transportation or zero emission electric vehicles? Or is it your responsibility to provide them with some sort of additional compensation, in reward for their putting in such a level of effort toward the emission reduction goals of your organization? When you begin to take responsibility for the activities of your employees, you begin to realize that their actions are major contributors to your business’s carbon footprint. In the modern world of capitalism, the owners of businesses need to take responsibilities.

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Telecommuting is Great for the World

When you get up in the morning, do you have to throw on fancy clothes, drive across town (or even to an entirely different city), then work for a set number of hours so that your employer knows that “somebody is there?” If you are an employee and work that kind of life, you most likely get irritated with it on a frequent basis. If you are a business owner, you have a lot of different considerations as to why that way is becoming something of an antique. It goes back to the days before we had all of these extremely sophisticated ways to keep in touch with one another, and before we could do just about everything from home.

But in this day and age, we have a huge amount of connectivity at our collective disposal. A person can do fully 9 out of 10 things from home that they used to have to go to an office building to do. And keep in mind that the 10th thing involves scoring face time with clients, which is something you can always do at a coffee shop or a meeting hall of some kind. You could even talk to clients while you take a short trip to Florida. The world of telecommuting today has great advantges because you can get a Florida vacation rental today and still be able to complete your work.   This is the essence of telecommuting; what used to be done at an office can now be done right from home. You can just roll out of bed, brush your teeth and get to work. And if it happens to be noon when you wake up, that really makes very little difference one way or the next.

But this is more than just a get out of jail free card for workers who would rather lounge around than actually get anything done. Telecommuting is a natural extension of a growing trend which is starting to gain momentum, called Results Only Work Environment. If you want to be cutesy about it, you can call your workers ROWErs – but joking aside, results are what you want, and a commute wastes precious time. If you have employees who are not in regular contact with the public, and they work better at night, let them. It also saves gas.

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