Super Commuters and the Price of Distance in the American Dream

TL;DR;

• American commutes have stretched from “annoying” to “super commuting,” where people cross entire metro areas or megaregions for work.¹
• The main culprit is a housing affordability crisis in job-rich cities, amplified by exclusionary zoning and decades of car-first policy.²³
• Long commutes harm physical and mental health, widen inequality, and pump out disproportionate climate emissions.⁴⁵
• Solutions are not just faster trains, but more housing near jobs, mixed-use zoning, safer walking and biking, and smart use of remote work.
• Even when people choose bikes or transit, they’re still moving through car-dominated space—so safety tools that “speak car,” like car-horn-loud bike horns, matter at the margin.

“Cities can be thought of as the absence of physical space between people and firms.”
— Edward Glaeser, Sprawl and Urban Growth (2003)

How America Ended Up So Far Apart

Americans joke about “soul-crushing commutes,” but the joke hides something structural: we’ve quietly normalized living far from almost everything that matters—jobs, schools, groceries, friends.

By 2019, the average one-way commute in the U.S. hit 27.6 minutes, the longest on record at the time.¹ That’s the mean. Millions of people are far beyond that, spending hours each day moving between their home “somewhere out there” and a job in a very different part of a metro area.

Urbanist Ray Delahanty, on his CityNerd channel, popularized a vivid slice of this story: “super commuters”—people who don’t just cross a city, but cross metro areas and even megaregions for work, helped by cheap flights, intercity trains, and more recently, hybrid work schedules.⁶ His analysis builds on earlier research by Mitchell Moss and Carson Qing at NYU, who defined a super commuter as someone who works in the core county of a metro area but lives outside that metro entirely.⁷

The key question behind his video—and this article—isn’t just how people super commute, but why Americans live so far from everything in the first place.

From “normal” commuting to super commuting

In Moss and Qing’s work, super commuters showed up first in places where high-wage jobs cluster in very expensive cores—New York, San Francisco, Dallas–Houston—while more affordable housing sprawls far beyond the traditional metro boundary.⁷ New data sources like the U.S. Census LEHD OnTheMap tool let researchers and data nerds trace those flows in detail.⁷

Overlay that with the megaregion concept from the Regional Plan Association (RPA)—giant economic belts such as the Northeast Corridor or the Texas Triangle⁸—and the pattern comes into focus:

• People work in job-dense nodes (Manhattan, downtown Boston, Silicon Valley, downtown Dallas/Houston).
• They increasingly live in cheaper nodes a metro or two away (Philadelphia, Providence/Worcester, Inland Empire, exurban California, San Antonio).
• Hybrid work makes it easier to justify: maybe you only endure the brutal trip a few days a week.

CityNerd’s super-commute walkthrough uses 2021 flows to show exactly that: workers streaming into New York from Philadelphia, into Boston from Worcester and Providence, into LA from the Inland Empire, and criss-crossing the Texas Triangle (Dallas–Houston–Austin–San Antonio). It’s not a fringe phenomenon—it’s baked into how U.S. housing and labor markets now interact.

To make this more concrete, here’s a stylized snapshot of inter-metro commuting patterns that show up in both academic work and CityNerd’s analysis of recent Census data:

The exact times depend on origin, mode, and traffic, but the underlying logic is the same: high opportunity and low housing supply on one end; lower housing costs and fewer jobs on the other.

The housing math that pushes people outward

If you strip away the anecdotes, a simple pattern emerges:

In job-rich neighborhoods where housing is scarce and expensive, people are pushed into longer commutes, while areas with more affordable, appropriately priced housing see shorter commutes.

Two strands of recent research back this up.

Jobs–housing “fit” and long commutes

Evelyn Blumenberg and Fariba Siddiq use a “jobs–housing fit” measure—how well the housing stock at different price points matches local wages—and find that areas with many jobs but too little affordable housing produce longer commute distances, especially for low-wage workers.² In other words, if your neighborhood has lots of jobs for your skill level but not enough housing you can afford, you’re statistically more likely to live farther away and commute in.

Another study by Blumenberg on housing affordability and commute distance comes to similar conclusions: in high-cost coastal regions, the trade-off between rent and commute is sharper, and households sacrifice time and distance to make housing costs bearable.³

Zooming into California, Suman Mitra and Jean-Daniel Saphores ask the blunt question, “Why do they live so far from work?” They find that the odds of long-distance commuting (≥50 miles one way) rise when housing near job centers is expensive and housing in outlying areas is cheaper.⁹ High home values near jobs pull people in one direction; lower prices out on the fringe pull them in the other.

Those findings are echoed by a 2024 report on supercommuting in the Northern California megaregion: despite being a small share of total commuters, long-distance drivers account for a disproportionately large share of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and emissions, and their origins are heavily concentrated in relatively more affordable inland counties that feed into the Bay Area.⁵

Policy choices that stretched the map

It’s tempting to explain all this as “personal preference” for big yards or quiet cul-de-sacs, but policy shaped those preferences and their consequences.

A few big levers:

• Highways and cheap driving. Federal highway programs and subsidized auto infrastructure made it easy to put miles between home and work. Glaeser and Kahn describe modern sprawl as “the product of car-based living,” enabled by huge investments in road capacity.¹⁰
• Mortgage and tax policy. New Deal agencies like the HOLC and later the FHA normalized long-term, amortized mortgages, helping mass-produce single-family suburban housing; later, the mortgage interest deduction and other tax breaks further favored homeownership on large lots.¹¹¹²
• Exclusionary zoning. Research by Glaeser and Gyourko and others shows that strict local zoning—especially low-density, single-family-only rules—drives up housing prices in high-demand cities.¹³¹⁴ The White House Council of Economic Advisers has explicitly linked exclusionary zoning to higher housing costs and reduced access to opportunity neighborhoods.¹⁵

The result is a country where:

• Many “good jobs” are in zoned-tight, high-price neighborhoods.
• Many homes that regular people can afford are in zoned-loose, far-flung suburbs or exurbs.
• Highways knit those places together, while everyday needs (schools, groceries, parks) are often not within walking distance, even inside the same suburb.

So Americans don’t just live far from work; they live far from everything.

What distance does to people and places

Long commutes feel bad for a reason. A growing body of research shows they hit health, climate, and equity all at once.

Health and well-being

A classic study by Hoehner and colleagues finds that longer commuting distances are associated with less physical activity, lower cardiorespiratory fitness, higher BMI, and worse metabolic risk profiles.⁴ You’re literally trading movement time for sitting time.

More recent work on commuting and mental well-being finds that longer commutes and congested, car-based trips are associated with higher stress and worse mood compared to shorter, active or high-quality transit commutes.¹⁶ A 2022 review on post-pandemic commuting suggests that simply going back to pre-COVID patterns without rethinking distance is a missed opportunity for public health.¹⁷

Even non-academic summaries from medical centers now routinely warn that long commutes raise risks of cardiovascular disease, stress, and pollution exposure.¹⁸

Climate and congestion

In Northern California, the supercommuting report mentioned earlier shows that commuters traveling ≥50 miles or ≥90 minutes each way contribute disproportionately to total VMT and greenhouse gas emissions, despite being a minority of workers.⁵ The longer the trip and the fewer alternatives to driving, the worse the footprint.

At a micro scale, the story is similar: data from places like Brentwood, California—now with average commute times near 46 minutes and a large share of workers commuting over an hour—illustrate how exurban growth tied to affordable housing can lock in high-emission travel patterns.¹⁹

Time, money, and inequality

The National Low Income Housing Coalition summarizes the equity side starkly: lack of affordable housing increases commute times, raises transportation costs, and reduces economic mobility.²⁰ Longer commutes mean:

• Less time for caregiving, community, and sleep.
• More spending on gas, maintenance, and transit fares.
• Higher risk of car crashes and pollution exposure.

And because lower-income households are often the ones pushed furthest out, they pay the highest time price to reach the same jobs.

Can we bring life closer again?

If we take distance seriously—not just congestion—we can sketch a more hopeful pattern: shorter trips, closer homes, and fewer people needing to cross entire megaregions to earn a living.

Here are the levers that matter most.

1. Build more housing where the jobs already are

Research on zoning and housing costs is remarkably consistent:

• Glaeser and Gyourko find that zoning and land-use controls are a dominant driver of high housing prices in many U.S. metros.¹³
• A recent review of zoning and urban inequality argues that low-density zoning “limits housing, increases costs, and reinforces segregation.”¹⁴
• Federal analysts and think tanks now routinely cite exclusionary zoning as a barrier to workforce mobility and climate goals, because it forces people to live farther from jobs.¹⁵²¹

On the flip side, where states have given developers pathways around local exclusion—for example, Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B, which lets mixed-income projects override some local bans in exclusionary suburbs—studies suggest it boosts affordable housing supply in job-rich but housing-resistant places.²²

If we want fewer super commuters, we need:

• More apartments and “missing-middle” housing (duplexes, fourplexes, courtyard buildings) in high-opportunity neighborhoods.
• By-right approvals for multi-family housing near major job clusters and high-capacity transit.
• Regional housing targets so each job-rich suburb can’t simply export its workers to a distant exurb.

2. Shorten trips, not just speed them up

We absolutely should improve intercity and regional rail—especially in places where supercommuting is already happening.

• In Florida’s emerging megaregion, Brightline now runs private higher-speed rail between Miami and Orlando, with ridership above 2.7 million riders in 2024 and strong growth in longer-distance trips.²³ The company is actively pursuing a Tampa extension, which would connect a corridor where many people currently drive long distances between Tampa Bay, Orlando, and South Florida.²⁴²⁵
• In the Texas Triangle, several high-speed rail proposals aim to connect Dallas, Houston, and potentially Austin and San Antonio. Federal and private efforts have been turbulent—funding and land acquisition remain major sticking points—but the reason the idea won’t die is that travel demand between these cities is already enormous, including for work.²⁶²⁷

Fast, frequent trains can turn a brutal car-based super commute into a workable, lower-stress trip, especially for those who only need to be in the office a day or two per week.

But that’s not enough on its own. To really shrink distance:

• Regional rail needs to behave more like urban transit: frequent, all-day, integrated with local buses and bike networks.
• Cities must retool streets for safe walking and cycling, so people can actually live near work and move around without a car.

That’s where small, practical details matter. If you commute by bike in car-dominated corridors, you often need a way to cut through the fog of driver distraction. Some riders use car-horn-loud bicycle horns (like the Loud Mini from Loud Bicycle) as a last-resort safety tool—something they’ll only hit in emergencies, but that drivers instantly recognize as a “real” horn, not a polite bell. The goal isn’t more noise; it’s a rare, high-salience signal in places that have already been built around cars.

3. Make remote work a tool for less travel, not more

During the pandemic, millions of Americans started working from home. ACS data show that by 2021, the share of workers primarily working from home roughly tripled compared to 2019, and average commute times dropped slightly where in-person commuting fell.²⁸

That created two countervailing trends:

• Some households moved farther out, betting they would only need to come in occasionally—a pattern you can see in exurban boom towns that suddenly sprouted super commuters once office mandates returned.
• Other regions seized the moment to rethink commuting altogether, exploring flexible hours, compressed weeks, and permanent hybrid arrangements.

Scholars studying telework warn of “rebound effects”: people who telework may live farther from work or take more non-work trips, offsetting some environmental gains.²⁹ The trick is to pair telework with land-use and transport policy:

• Encourage people who can work remotely most of the time to choose neighborhoods where daily life (errands, school, social life) is close at hand.
• Use reduced peak-hour volumes to reallocate road space to bus lanes, bike lanes, and safer crossings, making active commutes more attractive for those who still travel.

4. Design neighborhoods where “everything” is actually nearby

Finally, the most powerful way to cut super commuting is to make it less necessary to travel long distances for ordinary life.

That means:

• Mixed-use zoning that allows apartments above shops, corner groceries in residential areas, and small offices embedded in neighborhoods.
• Retrofitting car-oriented commercial strips and dead malls into walkable urban centers, as advocated by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson’s Retrofitting Suburbia.³⁰
• Prioritizing safe local streets—lower speed limits, protected bike lanes, pedestrian crossings—so that “living close” actually feels safe and usable for kids, older adults, and everyone in between.

When we do that, the “distance” in everyday life shrinks dramatically. Many trips disappear, others become short walks or bike rides, and the pressure to accept that 90-minute cross-metro commute loosens.

FAQ

Q 1. What exactly is a “super commuter”? A. In the U.S. research literature, a super commuter is typically someone who lives outside the metropolitan area where they work and travels very long distances—often 50+ miles or 90+ minutes one way—by car, train, plane, or a mix of modes.⁵⁷⁹

Q 2. Are super commutes really that common? A. They’re still a minority of commutes, but in expensive, job-rich regions like Northern California or the Northeast Corridor, hundreds of thousands of workers cross metro boundaries daily, and they contribute a disproportionate share of total vehicle miles and emissions.⁵²⁰

Q 3. Doesn’t remote work solve the long-commute problem? A. Remote and hybrid work reduce daily commuting, but they can also encourage people to live even farther away, turning rare trips into long-distance journeys; without housing and transport reforms, telework alone won’t fix super commuting and can even entrench it.¹⁷²⁹

Q 4. Is the main problem highways or zoning? A. Highways made long-distance commuting technically easy, but research suggests that restrictive zoning and limited housing near jobs are now the dominant drivers of high housing costs and long commutes in many metros, especially for lower-income households.²¹³¹⁴

Q 5. What can cities do quickly to shrink commutes? A. The fastest wins are legal and design changes: allow more housing near jobs and transit, streamline approvals for mixed-income projects, add bus and bike priority on key corridors, and redesign streets for safe walking and cycling so that nearby destinations truly feel close.²¹⁴²²

References