Commuting in a metropolitan society

Why is it that many people seem not to want answers to reasonable questions?

About ten years ago, I was reading the editorial column of a magazine, which boasted of its new premises in central London.  I think it was the very next month that the editorial column complained about the problems of commuting into London, and invited readers to contact them with solutions.

I emailed a solution, which was not acknowledged.  So far as I am aware, it was not published in the magazine.  Presumably therefore my proposed solution did not appeal to them.

Quite simply, my solution was that people should live and work in the same place, thereby eliminating the need to commute to work.  If you locate your business in central London, then you should aim to recruit people who already live in London.  If you want to employ people who live in Essex, then maybe you should locate your business in Colchester.

We seem to be living in a society which is increasingly metropolitan, by which I mean that it appears to be increasingly the case that jobs are concentrated in cities and large towns.  Consider some facts.

There has been a decline in rural employment in the past fifty years or so, resulting in part from increased mechanisation of farm work.  The number of people employed at deep coal mines has fallen from roughly  500,000 sixty years ago to precisely zero today, and most of the deep coal mines were located in villages, although a few were located close to towns.

There has also been a substantial decline in high street banking.  The result is that jobs are lost in small towns, and there has been a roughly corresponding rise in the use of call centres, which tend to be located in either cities or the larger towns.

In other words, it appears that if you want a job then you benefit from living in a city or a larger town.  One consequence of this is overcrowding in cities, and another is that people who live outside of the cities find it hard to avoid commuting to work – sometimes very long distances.  For example it was reported many years ago that Doncaster had become a popular commuter town for people working in London.

Next time you find yourself stuck in gridlocked traffic on the way to work, reflect that maybe it would make sense for the government to look for ways whereby more jobs can be located in villages and small towns.

Related previous posts include:
Railways need better management