My proposal is that employers pay a significant proportion of the costs of their employees moving to and from work each day. I think that this tax would alter the way employers view commuting time.
A variant on my tax proposal is that the distance of each persons commute to and from work be provided to the local municipality and the municipality be able to charge people for using the roads going to and from work. This would help recover some of the economic cost of people using fuel on the roads as they commute to and from work.
The benefit of the tax if sufficiently punitive would be to alter the way that people think of their environment. If you lived closer to where you work, you would think more about improving that area of the community to make it more pleasant. As it now stands, people will drive past slums and think nothing about how to improve the lot of the people living in those slums. This is at the root of inequalities within our environment.
We wonder why people live in bad areas, and we know that it is because they are poor. The problem is that skilled people bypass the poor areas and bypass improving the lot of people they could be helping. They bypass because they commute to work. If one reduces commuting, one forces people to think more about average neighbourhoods and give incentives of people in neighbourhoods to improve them because they must endure them all the time.