Educational Program: "The Future of Commuting: After The Pandemic"
Almost half of Americans worked from home during the pandemic. Workers scrambled to set up home office spaces and grew accustomed to Zoom meetings and comfortable stretchy attire. Employees who had to be in the workplace were often those most at risk of contracting COVID –- lower-paid service workers who were minorities.
Now, as COVID cases decline, employees are beginning to ponder a return to the workplace — and dreading their commute.
The Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in partnership with the National Press Foundation is offering this educational program for foreign and American correspondents to explore what’s next for workers who must get back into their cars or pack into subways and buses to get to the office. We’ll discuss what companies are considering right now and what workers are thinking.
Should public transit be free, as some big cities are offering? Should high-speed trains be back on the table? Would hybrid workweeks make a difference? And how might the Biden infrastructure bill affect those choices? We’ll take a peek into the future at some of the more attractive high-tech options and what it might mean for commuters. And we’ll hear what Europe is doing on all these fronts.
WHEN: Wednesday, June 16, at 11 a.m. EST
THE PROGRAM IS CLOSED. A REPORT ON THIS PROGRAM IS AVAILABLE HERE.
This program is funded by Bayer. The Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States and NPF are solely responsible for the content.
SPEAKERS
Henry Grabar is a staff writer at Slate who writes about cities. His work has also appeared in the Atlantic, Architectural Record, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications, and his research on the urban landscape of Algiers after 1962 was published in the journal Cultural Geographies. In 2018, his story on immigrants in in the meatpacking town of Fremont, Nebraska was a finalist for the Livingston Award for National Reporting by a journalist under 35. He was the editor of the Future of Transportation anthology (Metropolis Books, 2019) and is writing a book about parking for Penguin Press. He has a BA from Yale in French and American Studies, and he lives in New York.
Robert Puentes is President and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation a non-profit think tank with the mission of improving transportation policy and leadership. Prior to joining Eno, he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program where he directed the program’s Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative. He is currently a non-resident senior fellow with Brookings. Before Brookings, Robert was the director of infrastructure programs at the Intelligent Transportation Society of America.
Robert has worked extensively on a variety of transportation issues, including infrastructure funding and finance, and city and urban planning. He is a frequent speaker to a variety of groups, a regular contributor in newspapers and other media, and has testified before Congressional committees. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Virginia where he served on the Alumni Advisory Board, and was an affiliated professor with Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute.
Robert serves on a variety of boards including the Shared-Use Mobility Center, UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies, and Young Professionals in Transportation. Recent appointments include the Federal Advisory Committee on Transportation Equity, New York State’s 2100 Infrastructure Commission; the Advisory Council of the West Coast Infrastructure Exchange, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Transportation Reinvention Commission; the District of Columbia’s Streetcar Financing and Governance Task Force; the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority’s Technical Advisory Committee; and the Falls Church, Virginia Planning Commission where he lives with his wife and three sons.
