Does Your City Need a Time Policy Officer?

A case for local time policies that can help with our harried schedules

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After a very long summer away from school — officially 10 weeks of break, but a surprise set of half days last week due to lack of air conditioning in my kids’ school, plus a day off school for Labor Day this week has made it feel that much longer —  I have been wondering who decided that such a long summer break was a good idea. In the U.K., summer break is just six weeks long. In France, summer break is eight weeks long, but all workers are guaranteed five weeks paid vacation at a minimum. If everyone can enjoy summer vacation, a long break from school is a little more reasonable. Not so in the U.S., where there’s the added punishment of misaligned schedules between K-12 and college-aged kids, resulting in a lack of summer camp counselors and thus viable camps at the end of August.

I should be moving on this week, but I’m frustrated that major institutions like public schools set schedules that influence thousands of people’s lives with little consultation to see if these old paradigms still work in the 21st century. Summer break is one example, but there are plenty of others, like transit schedules, bar curfews, trash pick up. When was the last time you felt like you understood your city’s time policy strategy? “Never” is an acceptable answer. 

While time policy is a foreign concept in the U.S., it’s been around since the 1980s in Italy. You may have recently read of Bolzano in the New York Times, which was World Capital of Time Policies in 2023, and is one of the few Italian cities to buck Italy’s declining birthrate trend by crafting family-friendly policies. In terms of time policy, that looks like coordinating school schedules with parents’ work schedules.

Barcelona has been creating policies that value residents’ time for the past 20 years. “Our main mission is to promote a better organization of time in order to foster a healthier, more efficient and more equal society,” says Sonia Ruiz, Gender and Time Policies director at the Barcelona City Council in a EuroCities article about the city’s time policies.

In Barcelona, people can exchange services through a time bank, like helping someone with homework in exchange for help with their house

Some of the city’s time policies include the creation of time banks, where people exchange community services, such as helping students with homework in exchange for another task, such as performing a home repair. I love this example not only because it enables people without tons of money to access expensive services, but it also has the potential to create new social connections.

Other examples of time policies include extending the hours of public buildings or municipal services in order to better coordinate with real people’s schedules. Imagine if your local library was open until 11pm at night, instead of 5pm, and how that might change both how frequently you use the library and what kind of services it could provide.

Many of the strategies are meant to address time poverty — the fact that many people may not be technically financially impoverished but because they work multiple jobs or have extensive caregiving responsibilities they have little time to attend to the rest of life’s needs. To address time poverty, Barcelona rewards local businesses that encourage employees avoid work on weekends and guarantees their right to digital disconnection.

Respecting people’s time is critical these days. After all, what is the remote work revolution of the past 4.5 years but a grassroots attempt to have better control over time? It’s people trying to reclaim time from commuting. People wanting to not spend eight hours straight at work, but in a much more asynchronous, location-independent schedule. And for many people, it’s a way to arbitrage time, whether by being able to go grocery shopping midday, check in on a loved one during office hours, or access a new schedule by working for a company in a different time zone.

Likewise, many of the most popular companies working in urban areas are all about saving time for people — whether Uber and Lyft, or Doordash and Instacart. Do we really need government to create time policy officers or do we just need to be freed from the constraints of dumb schedules (see feelings about summer break above)?

I’ll explore the case for a Time Policy Officer in your city below the paywall:

• Why the 15-minute city is a great example of seeing a city through the lens of time

• Why time should be a livability metric, like access to housing or parks

• How cities should collect data to bolster the case for helping people save time, like congestion pricing

• Why we might not need so much personal time arbitrage if conventional schedules were updated to 21st-century needs, like the four-day work week.