Requiem for the Super Commuter
The pandemic-driven rise of remote work in 2020 emptied commuter trains in major cities and all but killed off the long-haul trip to the office. Is that a good thing?
Three passengers ride a usually packed commuter MARC train out of Penn Station en route to Washington, D.C., in April.
Photographer: Rob Carr/Getty Images North AmericaIn 2010, I stopped being a normal person and became what the U.S. Census Bureau calls a “mega commuter,” a super-awesome name for a famously miserable existence. Mega commuters are not people who go to work via robot suits or yogic flying. They are “those who travel 90 minutes or more and 50 miles or more to work, one-way.” They’re the next-level kin of super commuters, who travel 60 minutes per leg.
Before the pandemic, you used to hear a lot about such extreme commuters, because their numbers were often said to be growing, and their stories were irresistibly awful. As in this 2017 New York Times piece chronicling the predawn schleps of Manhattan-bound workers living in rural Connecticut and Pennsylvania, or this viral account of the six-hour odyssey endured by a Bay Area office worker who lived 80 miles away, in Stockton, tales of those willing to make epic sacrifices of time and effort just to get to work served as dramatic ways to illustrate the scale of the affordability crisis, and the tortured relationships Americans seemed to have with balancing their jobs and their life.