Bay Area officials make proposal to fight climate change

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KRON) - As a way to ease traffic congestion in the future and fight global warming, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is looking at requiring that large companies have the majority of their workforce work from home.  

Since the start of the pandemic, a lot of people have been working from home and that has resulted in a lot of transportation changes, such as fewer people driving out on the roadways and fewer people taking public transportation, like BART.  

Now, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has been looking at that and seeing if there are any lessons to be learned here to apply to Future Transportation Planning.  

As part of what's called the Plan Bay Area 2050, they are required to come up with a long-term plan for dealing with climate change and also for planning for future transportation issues.  

As part of that plan, they have a proposal to consider requiring large companies to make sixty percent of their workforce work from home. 

This is not a done deal. 

The MTC does not have the authority to enforce this on large companies, but they are looking at it as a potential way to achieve their goals. 

“We're obliged to develop a plan that shows how to cut per capita greenhouse gas emissions by 19 percent by the year 2035. So, it's in that context that this came up.  Neither MTC, nor our partner agency, the Association of Bay Area governments, we don't have the authority to do that,” John Goodwin said. 

This plan is very long term. There will be a lot of changes over the coming decades to that plan. 

Also, it would require an act of the legislature to actually enforce a work at home requirement for large companies.

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