A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Cities With the Fastest Car Commutes,” by Ray Smith, compared and contrasted (car) commute times in various cities in the USA. I appreciated how balanced the piece was, since most journalism about commuting focuses only on the drudgery and waste of time spent commuting, and about how that burden edges relentlessly upward1. But Smith had the grace to point out that while (car) commuting times are higher now (26.8 minutes each way) than in the last couple of years, as we exit the pandemic era, they are actually lower than they were prior to the pandemic (27.6 minutes in 2019). The trend over the longer term is indeed very slowly upward, however, for a variety of reasons (e.g., increasing suburban sprawl): in 1985 it was 22 minutes, versus today’s 26.8. Is a 4 or 5 minute increase over some four decades a lot?
(I inserted that parenthetical (car) in the prior paragraph since most commutes are by car. But of course one can commute by taking mass transit, biking, walking, etc. However, if we’re talking about really long commutes, those are dominated by not by cars but by mass transit which, in the US at least, is not very rapid.2)
The Journal article prompted me to share some excellent research about the impact on commuting trips of WFH (work from home), as calculated by the researchers at the appropriately-named… WFH Research. A few months back they released a report called The Rise in Super Commuters, by Bloom and Finan. They define Super Commuters as persons driving at least 75 miles one way to work. Using data from INRIX (where Finan is employed) from the ten largest metropolitan areas in the USA, they demonstrate clearly that this group of hard-core road warriors has gained share of total commuting since the pandemic:
(Note the gains among other long hauls as well, such as 50-74 miles and 45-49 miles.) This is a pretty extraordinary development, especially as the authors calculate the time Super Commuters spend driving (each way each day) comes out at 2 hours and 20 minutes or so. What (excuse the pun) drives such extreme behavior? Specifically, why has it increased in the time span between the pre- and post-pandemic era, from 2.2% to 2.9% of all commutes, or from 7.3% to 8.9%, if we throw in the 50-74-milers, too?
The authors have two hypotheses, both related to the rise in WFH, whose prevalence they calculate has gone up 5-fold since the pandemic. First, WFH makes commuting, when it does occur, relatively more bearable. Thus, if I am driving into work only 2 days a week, for example, rather than 5, I am probably more willing to rack up the miles. And second, WFH reduces traffic volume (and spreads it more evenly across the day), enabling higher speeds (maybe only a couple of miles per hour, but it adds up!), and thus making super-commutes less painful in terms of time spent.
This is yet another instance of the amazingly complex and interconnected system that is “automobility:” a clear trend to working from home (where the “commute” is maybe the 20 seconds it takes to walk upstairs to the home office) triggers a clear trend to driving farther (at least among our dedicated road warriors). Predicting the way our mobility habits will evolve remains mysterious and often counter-intuitive.
We’ll see if these amazing feats of endurance persist. The authors believe WFH will continue on at a higher level than before the pandemic, and thus these very long drives as well. If so, I am sure the audiobook industry is popping champagne corks now!
As an interesting footnote to all this, I discovered in the report’s other charts, specifically those breaking out commutes at the individual city level (not for all ten combined, as above) an interesting artifact. The chart for the Los Angeles metro surprised me, since Accepted Wisdom is that LA has problematic long and slow commutes. And maybe, net net, it does.3 But when we look at the left side of the LA chart (below) we see that 43% of LA driving commutes (averaging pre- and post-pandemic numbers) are less than 25 miles each way. This is better (shorter) than 8 out of the 10 cities examined (only Miami is even shorter, at about 45% of commutes under 25 miles). New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and the rest all show a smaller percentage of commutes at this shortest distance. Many people in LA are just not driving very far, amazingly. And before you say “Well, yes, shorter drives in terms of miles, but not in terms of time,” I’ll point you to the TomTom Traffic Index ranking for 2023, which shows Los Angeles’s (and Miami’s) average traffic speed to be higher than many other places, including Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, etc.
Maybe it’s time to revisit the “LA gridlock” trope?
Generally, as readers will know from my other posts on commuting, I consider the drudgery-and-waste view of commuting to be accurate but also incomplete. Certainly most people would prefer shorter commutes, but for many people the commute is not a burden imposed on them by external evil forces, but the the result of choices freely made about where to live. A self-inflicted burden, as it were. The low-income cleaners working at a hotel in the CBD certainly have long commutes forced upon them. But for many long-haul commuters the drive is at least partially voluntary: if you want to live in a leafy rural area far from your work, the long commute is the price you have voluntarily chosen to pay for that lifestyle. And the price may not be all that high: indeed, one study shows that the average DESIRED commute duration is 19 minutes, not far from where we are now. See the chart from this post.
Don’t believe me? Check out this chart from transportation expert Wendell Cox. Getting on the bus may be good for the environment and inexpensive and let you spend time reading a Grisham, but it is not quick:
However, some drivers seem to have a ball executing this commute! (Turn down speakers if you are at work… except maybe if you are at WFH.)