OUTDATED STEREOTYPES AND URBAN PLANNING:

Removing the bane of most employees’ morning routine—a long slog from the suburbs to a workplace in the city center—turns out might also be the most potent way to reduce carbon emissions. You don’t need to be well-versed in the complexities of labor economics to grasp this simple concept: teleworking reduces infrastructure costs for municipalities and limits transportation expenses for workers, both in terms of time wasted and money spent riding trains, metros, and busses.

And as an article from City Journal notes, the number of teleworkers now almost rivals the number of strap-hangers across the country. . . .

The effects of these combined changes are only set to grow.

And yet urban planners persist in their folly of “investing” tens of billions of dollars on urban rail projects that, between the coming of autonomous vehicles and the growing role of telework, will almost certainly be underutilized. Those elephants you see before you, dear urbanists: they’re white, not green. An environmentally-conscious urbanism should be looking to create a favorable business climate for the tech-heavy and emissions-light businesses of the future.

Light rail offers enormous opportunities for graft. The other stuff not so much.