The savings comprise gas, car maintenance and repairs, as well as the costs that driving imposes on society, such as congestion and polluting, said Adam Ozimek, chief economist at Upwork.
That adds up, given Americans’ long commutes. Americans spent an average of 54.2 minutes commuting daily in 2018, according to Ozimek. Commute times have been rising for decades, and big job markets in high-cost and high-commute metropolitan areas like New York or the San Francisco Bay Area aren’t helping to bring those averages down.
Underscoring this point further is a look at cities where workers would most benefit from working remotely in the long term: East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, a commuter town that’s in close enough reach to both the New York City metro area and Philadelphia, stands to see the biggest time gain for remote work, followed by New York-Newark-Jersey City and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, according to the Upwork report.
“I definitely think we’ll see a migration from higher cost of living to lower cost of living,” Ozimek said.
Still, continued working from home is bad for the local economies supporting former office environments, as the worker who stays home doesn’t pay for transportation, morning coffee, lunch or other conveniences that are in the vicinity of the office. This puts jobs in the infrastructure that supports offices at risk.