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"Who are all these people? Why are they not at work?"
That's typically the first thought that crosses the mind of Erika, a 36-year-old attorney in New Jersey, when she commutes mid-day or runs an early-afternoon errand, only to find the sidewalks stuffed with people. Then comes the sobering realization: "I'm like, 'well, you're also not at work.'"
The 3:44 pm express train she catches from New York City back to Jersey should be a fairly breezy, off-peak commute. Instead, she often finds herself shoulder to shoulder with other supposedly savvy workers. Across the country, there's been an influx of commuters like Erika: Folks who, pre-pandemic, would be chained to their desks until 5 p.m. (at least). Now, these workers are far more flexible — able to head home a little early to handle childcare pickups, errands, or pets, and then pick up work remotely — which means a better quality of life for many.
It also means we're all commuting in really weird ways. If you've decided to drive home at 2:17 p.m., or hop on the subway at 10:08 a.m., you've probably noticed you're not alone — even if you thought you would be.
"The hours have been, I think, changing for a lot of jobs. They're allowing people to come in either later or earlier," says Richard Hack, a med tech based in Pennsylvania. Hack's daily commute of nearly 160 miles round-trip has slowly expanded from an hour and a half a few years ago to around two hours each way. He now leaves his house at 5 a.m. to make a 7 a.m. start, and heads out at 3:30 p.m to make it home by 6 p.m.
When the pandemic hit and reshaped work, we were handed something beautiful: The end of the commute. But as employees began getting called back in, and remote work dissipated for many, this lavish travel-less era quickly came to a close.
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The full remote-work era is over, and now we're living with the vicious commuting aftereffects. Americans are spending more time than ever before in traffic — an average of 63 hours in 2024 — and congestion has spread out throughout the day as more Americans head to and from work at odd hours. It turns out that there's no off-peak when everyone is commuting at all times of the day.
Welcome to the never-ending rush hour.
Commuting has always been a pretty bleak part of the modern work experience. The mean travel time reached a new high in 2019, with Americans spending an average of 27.6 minutes for a one-way trip, up from 25 in 2006. That data tracks workers aged 16 and older who don't work from home and looks at survey respondents' last week of commuting. In the year before the pandemic, a record high 9.8% of workers spent an hour or more commuting.
Then came the remote work shock. Commute times plunged, even as vaccines became more widespread and more folks started tentatively reentering their cubicles. Now, though, we're approaching those pre-pandemic peaks: In 2024, the average commute time rose to 27.2 minutes — the second highest on record.
The share of workers driving to work has ticked back up over the last few years, although it's below pre-pandemic levels. Ultra-long commutes are also making a sharp comeback, with 9.3% of workers traveling an hour or more to work — a sharp increase from 7.7% in 2021.
Chalk some of that up to pandemic migration patterns. On the whole, folks moved further away from their offices, according to data shared with me by Stanford's work-from-home research team. A greater share of Americans now live more than 50 miles from the office, and the mean distance to work is higher than it was pre-pandemic.
Part of that might be due to the kinds of homes Americans could afford in the wake of the real estate chaos of the past few years. Alex Thomas, a research manager at John Burns Research and Consulting, tells me that Americans moving into new-build homes are spending longer on the road. "A new construction homebuyer typically commutes about 10 to 15% longer than the typical homeowner," Thomas told me. In other words, the places where people can afford to buy (especially younger people looking for a deal) are much further from office hubs. Take ex-urban markets like Stockton, California, or Greeley, Colorado, for example. They're both tied to major employment hubs, the Bay Area and Denver, respectively, but offer much cheaper, newly-constructed housing — and much longer commutes — than the core of those cities.
"There's this notion of drive till you qualify," Thomas says. "If you're going to buy a house that's a little bit cheaper, a little bit further out, you're probably going to have to drive further to work or to cultural amenities."
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Not all new construction buyers are cash-strapped. Some might be seeking a more luxurious, customizable, or spacious option. But for entry-level buyers, new homes offer affordability that other properties might not — as Thomas says, developers and builders will often offer incentives like mortgage rate buydowns, which help lower monthly payments considerably and help entry-level buyers get in the door. And moving far away is still worth it for new home buyers. Thomas found that, on average, they work from home more often than the typical homeowner, so while each trip may be longer, their total weekly commute time may even out.
On the whole, many folks seem willing to make a longer commute trade-off, especially since they have more flexibility baked into what was once a rigid routine. Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said it's possible a hefty chunk of white-collar workers would say that their commutes are better than before, simply because they hop behind the wheel or hoof it on the train less often. Maybe they're exposed to more congestion when they're on the road, but if they're not commuting daily, they mentally bake in the days they're not dealing with traffic.
The problem is that everyone is on the road all the time now. If you work from home part-time, and your other neighbor does too, and then you both head out at an off hour for a long drive, you're now two more cars on the road. In 2019, according to a report from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, 70.5% of weekday delays on national freeways happened during the morning and evening peaks — from 6-10 a.m., and 3-7 p.m., respectively. Around 5% of that delay has shifted from peak periods into the midday hours of 10 a.m.-3 p.m. The hours of 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. have seen marked increases, in particular. The magnitude of the delays is also greater; even if there's technically less share of delay during peak hours, commuters are still spending more time in traffic than they did in 2019.
Whenever Carrie Weston, 43, sits in her Minnesota office, she's constantly staring down at her afternoon fate. Her window overlooks one of the main highways circling the city, giving her a real-time update on how snarled her road home will be. Weston is one of the flexible workers putting in long commuting hours (she drives at least 45 minutes one way, and that can stretch to 2.5 hours depending on the weather). As a mom of six, she adds on drive time for after-school activities.
"If the traffic is bad or if there's an accident, it really, really impacts the rest of our life," Weston says. According to the TAMU report, commuters across the country are accumulating a historic number of hours delayed, even as weekdays account for a smaller share of total delay. The endless rush hour is even snaking into the weekends: both Saturday and Sunday have a higher share of total delays than in 2019.
"My family will be out and about on the weekends, and we're like, 'Why is it stop-and-go traffic on a Saturday afternoon?'" Weston says. That could come from a slew of factors: partial-remote workers are eager to get out of their houses; they live farther from the cultural or economic activities they enjoy; they no longer have to allocate that weekend time to errands, and can instead devote it to longer leisure trips. Add in all of the workers who have to go in on weekends — like service workers, or those in healthcare — and you've got a traffic jam.
So what's there to do about our now-omnipresent rush hour? It's possible that we're doomed to a traffic-infested country — the price we pay for that oh-so-valuable flexibility. But if we want to actually fight back against the ballooning time behind the wheel, there are options. One answer: scaling up public transportation. New York's subway system has added more trains on busy express lines to accommodate shifting travel times, extending rush-hour service earlier and later, and removing trains from previously peak slots. But unless America dramatically revamps and builds a huge swath of public transportation, it might be worth looking to the road — and putting that flexibility to good use.
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"What do we do about the fact that highways and urban areas are so congested?" Manville says. "The answer that no one particularly likes, but the only one that's ever been shown to work at all is, you price those highways dynamically." That would be a different model than the flat congestion pricing in New York City, but instead more akin to Singapore: Depending on how many people want to use the road at certain times, the price goes up or down, with pricing calibrated to keep the road moving between 45 and 55 miles an hour. When the road is moving faster than the target traffic flow, the pricing should drop; when it creeps above that, the pricing should go up, making drivers reconsider whether to take another route or wait it out.
That might lead to a more moderate, but still constant, rush hour, spreading out cars further — in other words, midday driving might become more prevalent, but will clear the road for those who have hard ins at the office (like service workers). It could end up being an accelerant of the current trend, spreading traffic out more, while also generating revenue for road maintenance and reducing wear and tear. Importantly, according to one study, some forms of this pricing can offer something current traffic-dwellers crave: Knowing how long it'll take them to travel somewhere. Of course, that type of pricing can have its own drawbacks. For tradespeople or workers with set shift commutes, which might fall during the higher-priced times of day, the tax can fall regressively — an area where, Manville says, it might be worth localities thinking about who to exempt from a potential levy.
If the first work-related reckoning of the pandemic was the discovery that remote work is feasible, maybe its subsequent flexibility — and the high-traffic situations it brings — can spark a new reckoning about how and when we get to where we're going. We're all sharing the road (or subway) together a lot more; maybe that commuting visibility can spark a larger change.
Juliana Kaplan is a senior reporter on the economy team, where she covers the labor force, kitchen table economics, and the people behind the numbers.
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