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If commutes are paid and people are free to choose where they live, you're incentivizing LONGER commutes.
If commutes are paid and you need to incentivize shorter commutes, either the government or the employer is going to be able to tell you exactly where you're allowed to live. And if you and your partner work far away from each other, you'll just have to live in separate homes.
You're already free to live closer to your job. I could live 150 meters from the office but choose not to because I want there to be greenery around my home. So I live 3 kilometers away and walk through a pretty nice part of town, including several parks.
You're telling me you want a system where my employer can tell me to fuck off and drive to work or pay more rent to live in a worse apartment. It'd be prohibitively expensive to build a train line I could take to work. Buses are slower than driving.
Plus think about it. Downtown rent is already super high. If your location now determines which jobs you're allowed to work, this gets worse.
There are much less draconian solutions for what you're after. Here's one I literally just came up with: Mandate new developments to have a minimum occupant density. Make it dependent on total population of the city. Include downtown office and shopping zones in this law, they also need to have a minimum population capacity so you'll have a condo tower next to an office tower, or an office tower with apartments on some floors. Include a clause that old neighborhoods are to be demolished once they haven't been compliant to the regulations for 5, maybe 10 years. By the time this happens to anyone, the land under the house will be worth way more than the house because it could house more units and once population is up, demand for real estate goes up too.
Or just have really high congestion charges and include suburbs for it. When nobody can afford to drive to work, apartments near jobs go up in demand and more get built. Demand for public transit goes up and ideally more gets built.
We aren't free to choose where we live! We're forced to choose what we can afford. Your employer already tells you where you're allowed to live by what they pay you!
You're describing a world that already exists. This just changes the incentive structure.
I can live in any part of my country with what I'm paid, just as long as I don't try to rent or buy a gigantic penthouse apartment or mansion. That's while my wife stays home, too. No, I'm not super highly paid, I just live in a not particularly dense country and have a good career.
The world you're proposing would not allow me such freedom. Like I said, if employers get to decide our commutes, the simple luxury of walking to and from work are gone because it's an inefficient use of company time. I want this to be my time, not company time. Hell, managing my own time is why I started working B2B instead of full time so the commute doesn't apply to me anymore, but if I ever have to work directly for someone else again, I'm not willing to let anyone tell me which neighborhood my family needs to move to in order for me to get the job, or how I must arrive at work.
I get that for you all that matters is borg-like efficiency, but some people value individual humans and their rights too.
Most of us don't have careers like that, surely you realize this? We live where we can afford, our individual rights don't really matter.
You actually do raise a good point that this would disincentivize walking, biking, and public transportation. The boss would demand the fastest possible commute i.e. driving. Not good!
Paying people a standard rate based on the optimal estimated commute would address that issue, but that's not exactly fair to people that can't drive and that still leaves motorists being underpaid for traffic jams and the like. It's better than just forcing workers to bare 100% of the cost and be uncompensated for their time.
Also the Borg made a lot of good points.
Something you might want to look into is the de minimis benefits in the Philippines. Employers can literally give their employees something like a rice subsidy tax free. It's a poor country so their benefits are different from what we'd need in the west. And the de minimis are supposed to be really tiny benefits.
In Estonia, we have something called a personal car usage compensation. There's a monthly limit in euros compensated per employee and a limit amount per kilometer as well. This year it was raised to max 550 EUR per month and 0.50 EUR per kilometer tax free. So you drive your personal car around for work for 100 kilometers, you get up to 50 euros (depends on employer). Significantly more than the fuel costs, but that's how it's supposed to be - cars also depreciate and need maintenance.
So what do I propose? A tax-free commute benefit. Limit the tax-free status to say 10 miles each way worth of benefit and (this is crucial) make it have rapidly diminishing returns. First mile is 10 dollars, second mile is 5 dollars, etc. Stop reducing it once you hit a dollar per mile. Now your commute time is worth money, but it's worth more money if you live closer to work. Round up to the nearest whole mile too. Live 100 yards from work? Employer can pay you for a mile worth of commute tax-free. This is now the most efficient minute of your day with regards to earnings.
This structure incentivizes employers to pay it out as a benefit because it's tax free so it's more efficient than paying the same amount as wages plus adding it on top of your existing compensation package makes you more attractive as an employer. It doesn't incentivize the employees to increase their commute length on purpose because the extra amount drops off so quickly plus it doesn't incentivize employers to set limits on where they hire from or how the employees compute.
Drawback is that it doesn't do a whole lot to address the density (lack of density) issue, but there are other solutions for that. Maybe sometimes two problems need two or even three or more solutions, rather than one single unifying solution that causes more problems than it solves.
Okay, but here in the US we have long commutes so I'm concerned about addressing a different problem. There are people at my factory with 40-50 minute commutes at highway speeds. One way. We don't even get paid that much!
This all happened without any incentives for for anyone to increase commute length. It's just a consequence of property markets.
You're concerned about different things than I am.
That's because you have moronic zoning laws. The fix is to start by replacing those, not punishing people.