{"id":2027,"date":"2021-04-07T18:40:05","date_gmt":"2021-04-08T00:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:10043\/lets-make-less-traffic-part-of-the-new-normal-for-nashville\/"},"modified":"2025-03-07T07:14:49","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T13:14:49","slug":"lets-make-less-traffic-part-of-the-new-normal-for-nashville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/lets-make-less-traffic-part-of-the-new-normal-for-nashville\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s make less traffic part of the new normal for Nashville"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Atiba Founder & CEO, JJ Rosen; This article originally appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The Tennessean<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Remember when the biggest problem our city had was what to do about all the traffic?<\/p>\n

Those were the days.\u00a0 Families were split over light rails, buses, and higher taxes<\/a>. There was honest debate and passion on both sides, but ultimately the citizens of Nashville voted to kick the can down the road.\u00a0 The\u00a0mass transit referendum<\/a>\u00a0crashed, and our big-city traffic challenge continued.<\/p>\n

Until a couple of months ago, when a new problem arrived.<\/p>\n

With the onset of a global pandemic, all the debate over traffic jams has been long forgotten.\u00a0It\u2019s not just that the health and economic impacts of the\u00a0coronavirus\u00a0<\/a>make the inconveniences of a longer commute seem minuscule in comparison. It\u2019s also that the coronavirus has literally reduced our traffic.<\/p>\n

When almost everyone works from home, the need for mass transit solutions and their associated expenses completely disappear.\u00a0 No more rush hours, less pollution, fewer accidents, and less lost time on the road.\u00a0 Although it\u2019s a trade-off no one ever imagined or wanted, being forced to work from home these past weeks has solved many of our traffic problems faster than any of the traditional solutions that most big cities are eventually forced to adopt.<\/p>\n

In normal times, the idea of working from home has been validated many times over as a win-win for both employees and employers.\u00a0 Employers have come to realize that less time commuting means more time working and more productivity.\u00a0 And most employees have found that they are happier and enjoy more job satisfaction when they have the freedom and flexibility that comes with working from home.<\/p>\n

Until now, though, most of us have not seen the direct benefit that a city derives from massive numbers of people working from home.<\/p>\n

Cities across the world are seeing significant air quality improvements.\u00a0 With less money spent on gas and lower car insurance rates being rolled out, costs of living are going down. \u00a0And for those whose jobs depend upon them getting to a physical workplace, quality of life has improved with their commute times being cut in half while office workers stay off the roads.<\/p>\n

It goes without saying that\u00a0pandemics are not solutions to traffic problems. But its byproducts \u2014\u00a0a massive adoption of telecommuting and in turn a massive reduction in traffic \u2014\u00a0can help us reset our thinking about long-term transit solutions.<\/p>\n

Since we now know with certainty that a huge shift to working from home is a solution to our traffic woes, how can we promote this approach in a post-pandemic world?<\/p>\n

The good news is that the pandemic we are experiencing has forced even the most old-school office employers to realize that working from home is not bad.\u00a0 Lawyers, doctors, and even large corporations that have traditionally been 100% office-based have quickly become telecommuter converts.\u00a0\u00a0 Working from home is now an easy sell.<\/p>\n

But for this new norm to have staying power (and solve our traffic problems permanently), we need to incentivize businesses<\/a> to make telecommuting a no-brainer.<\/p>\n

Offering remote-friendly companies incentives like tax breaks, more access to city government contracts, or even cash payments based on carbon emission reductions would be cheaper and certainly faster than implementing a light rail system.\u00a0 It wouldn\u2019t be perfect, but with working at home easier than ever before and traffic generally worse than ever before, it\u2019s an outside-the-box fix that this pandemic has shown could actually work.<\/p>\n

As a recent popular meme has said, when we wish that things would go back to normal, we ought to think carefully about which parts of \u201cnormal\u201d we want to get back to.\u00a0Traffic in Nashville is a norm that we may not want to return to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Atiba Founder & CEO, JJ Rosen; This article originally appeared in\u00a0The Tennessean Remember when the biggest problem our city had was what to do about all the traffic? Those were the days.\u00a0 Families were split over light rails, buses, and higher taxes. There was honest debate and passion on both sides, but ultimately the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":2028,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atiba-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}