Thread by @muralipiyer

I believe what’s happening now is a disruption in the way we think of commutation.

The pandemic has shown us that an 8-hr office is not really necessary.
Of course, there are sectors where Work-From-Home doesn’t make sense.
But, vast majority of work can be done from home.

https://twitter.com/paulwallbank/status/1322392405572612098

The reason: we have now digital connectivity substituting for physical or road connectivity.
This is an option we never had in the past.

Technically, we can employ people from home, with an occasaional face to face interaction for certain limited activities that require physical presence.

What does this mean for wages?
Well, without the travel component, employees can be paid a bit less. Employees won’t mind because their net savings is not getting affected.
For example, if commute cost was ₹5000 a month, employees will now delighted with a ₹4000 cut in salary.

If the requirement to travel is limited to say once or twice a week, the employees can now shift to farther suburbs. These would definitely be cheaper to rent or to own.
Essentially, the suburbanisation trend will increase.

Most things we need can be bought online now. Even otherwise, more suburbanisation will automatically trigger expansion of services in farther areas. The immediate needs of households can be met by these people. Or, there will be more job opportunities for tertiary sector.

Decongestion of cities won’t affect the cities much. As suburbs expand, the effective area of the city itself is going to expand.
With more people in suburbs, public transportation will expand accordingly.

This doesn’t mean that the traditional offices will die.
There will always be asymmetry in the transformation. Rome was not built in a day.

The impact of changing commutation trends will have wider impacts.
Remember that most shops have sprung up in places where a lot of people commute.
Physical shops had always depended on many people walking in front of them.

Some of the shops will lose the location advantage. But, they can always shift to places that make more sense from sales perspective.
Maybe, some might use online sales to supplement their income.
This shift in shopping is bound to happen.

What I hope is that more tight knit communities evolve in the suburbs. If there is no community engagement, we lose as social animals.

The trend I’m visualising is a shift from large cities to a city surrounded by satellite cities.
I’m also seeing a trend of strengthening of nearby towns and villages.

If we only have to commute to office say twice a week, it might make more sense to live in a town an hour or two away. Even a town 3 hours away won’t be much of a problem, considering that the pain is lesser. (Total commute time becomes 12 hours per week).

For example, Mumbai-Pune is just about 3 hours apart.
So someone could actually think of staying in Pune and commuting to Mumbai those two days. Children’s education can be managed in Pune. Spouse can now work in Pune. Even a Lonavla in between starts making sense.

From administration perspective, the road network will still have to be strengthened. People are not going to be kind on administrations that don’t maintain these 2-3 hour long road/rail lines.

Change in the way we move also means a drastic reduction in city resource management and city pollution.

Some of the administrative boundaries will stop making sense. Political lines will get redrawn.

Also, the advantages of city life will start dwindling. As suburbs grow, as neighbouring towns and villages grow, they too will start getting the convenience benefits of cities.
Good Schools, hospitals, etc will start coming up in villages too. Cost is low, demand is better.

Even now in cities, we have children traveling in school buses for 1-2 hours.
It won’t matter much whether the school is at a remoter locality.

The way things evolve, real wages can fall without compromising on real savings because real expenses too would have fallen.
The key factor of employment is real wages. Even if there is a small improvement (1% is awesome in this decade), people will lap it up.

Surprisingly, spreading of population is an excellent way to mitigate future pandemic. Let’s never forget that Wuhan virus had its way only because all our cities are crowded. The virus hadn’t done much damage in rural areas. Isolation is also far easier in rural areas.

I strongly believe that this decentralisation trend is here to stay.
It had started before the pandemic. This pandemic and extensive lockdowns in many cities have only made the shift to villages more appealing.

And, then there is the best kept open secret of working.
An employee’s productive hours in traditional offices was barely 50%. For most people, it was just 20%.
The rest of the time was spend acting busy so that people will believe that they are doing a lot of work.

WFH has enabled people to spend just those same 2-3 hours of work. They add a few meetings online to give a sense that they are all terribly busy. The rest of the time they are spending in home doing things they should have done but didn’t have time to do.

Many of the house chores are getting done now.
A lot of mundane maintenance (except those that need hand and materials) have now been done. The overall expenses have come down because replacing stuffs(the last resort) have fallen.

There are many behavioural changes recorded over the past 8 months.

This has made the shift towards the decentralisation more viable now.

One thing is going to be certain though.
This disruption is not going to be instantaneous.
We will see the changes happen over the next 2-3 years. By the end of this decade, we would not even realise that a huge change had taken place until someone writes a nostalgic article.

@threadreaderapp thread unroll please

So, here is a video on the changing scenario.