Gone by Tuesday: Forty Years of Experts Who Saw the End of the Commute Coming—They Just Couldn't See What Replaced It

In the grand tradition of this website, we'd like to salute the predictions that were technically, eventually, kind of correct—but wrong about everything surrounding the correctness. This is the story of remote work prophecy: a genre of futurism that got the destination right and completely missed the road.

The Telecommuting Evangelists of the Reagan Era

The word "telecommuting" was coined by NASA engineer Jack Nilles in 1973, which means the concept has been promising to liberate American workers from their morning drives for over fifty years. But it was the 1980s when the predictions really started flowing, buoyed by the arrival of the personal computer and something called "the information economy."

Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, published in 1980, described the rise of the "electronic cottage"—a vision of Americans working from home via networked computers, reclaiming their time from the industrial-era factory model that had, in Toffler's telling, already overstayed its welcome by about a century. This was an appealing idea. It was also, at the time, technologically premature by approximately forty years, a detail that did not stop it from being cited approvingly in countless business publications throughout the decade.

By 1985, Fortune was writing about the coming wave of telecommuters. The estimates were specific and therefore, as specific estimates usually are, magnificently wrong. Fifteen million Americans would be working from home by 1990. The interstate highway system, already aging, would see dramatically reduced daytime traffic. The necktie industry faced existential questions.

In 1990, approximately four million Americans worked from home with any regularity, most of them self-employed, and the necktie industry was doing fine.

The Internet Changes Everything (The Commute Remains)

The arrival of the commercial internet in the mid-1990s gave the telecommuting prophets a powerful new argument, and they used it with gusto. Bandwidth was increasing. Email was universal. Video conferencing, then a grainy, lag-ridden novelty, was obviously about to become seamless. The office, said a remarkable number of very serious people in very serious publications, was a relic of an era when information could only travel as fast as a human carrying it.

Forbes declared in 1995 that by 2000, at least a third of the American workforce would be working remotely some or all of the time. Wired—always Wired—published visions of distributed workforces collaborating across geography with no loss of cohesion, creativity, or corporate culture. The commute was not merely impractical; it was, according to several pieces that have aged in a particular way, morally indefensible given what we knew about air quality and productivity.

By 2000, roughly 9 million Americans worked from home at least part-time. The average American commute had gotten longer. Suburban sprawl, low gas prices, and the fact that most jobs still required physical presence had conspired to produce more gridlock, not less. The morning drive was alive, thriving, and backed up past the exit for the Cracker Barrel.

The Aughts: Better Technology, Same Parking Lots

Broadband expansion through the 2000s gave the predictions fresh ammunition. High-speed home internet became widely available. Laptops became genuinely portable. Smartphones arrived. Surely, now, the commute was finished.

The predictions of this era have a specific flavor: they acknowledge that previous predictions were premature, then make essentially the same prediction with more confident timelines. "This time the technology is actually there," they explain, correctly, before underestimating every non-technological variable involved in changing how 150 million employed Americans spend their days.

Corporate culture, it turns out, is not a problem that faster upload speeds solve. Managers who believe presence equals productivity do not update this belief when presented with a Cisco white paper. Commercial real estate is a multi-trillion-dollar industry with powerful incentives to keep offices occupied. And many workers, despite the prophecies written on their behalf, actually preferred the social texture of an office to working next to the pile of laundry they'd been meaning to fold since March.

2020: The Prophets Achieve Partial Credit

And then a coronavirus made the decision for everyone.

In March 2020, roughly 50 million Americans shifted to remote work in what was, by any measure, the most dramatic validation of the telecommuting prophets' core thesis in history. The commute vanished. The office emptied. The electronic cottage that Toffler had described in 1980 materialized, more or less simultaneously, across the country.

The prophets were right. The commute was, in fact, unnecessary for a very large number of jobs. Technology did, in fact, support distributed work at scale. This vindication was real.

What the prophets had not predicted, in forty years of confident forecasting, was any of the following: the Zoom fatigue that would set in by approximately week three; the discovery that back-to-back video calls are, if anything, more exhausting than in-person meetings; the erosion of the boundary between work hours and all other hours; the particular misery of a "quick sync" scheduled for 6 p.m. on a Friday; or the way the commute—that much-maligned, traffic-choked, podcasted buffer between professional and personal life—would, in its absence, reveal itself to have been doing something useful all along.

Some workers got their time back. Others found that their employer had simply colonized the hours previously lost to transit. The saved commute became, in many households, additional availability. The calendar, freed from the constraint of physical meetings, expanded to fill every available slot like a gas seeking equilibrium.

What the Prophets Kept Getting Wrong

The remote work prophets made a consistent error across four decades: they modeled the commute as pure waste and assumed its elimination was pure gain. They were not wrong that the commute is inefficient. They were wrong that efficiency, once recovered, would stay recovered.

Humans and institutions are remarkably good at filling time. Remove one obligation and another expands to replace it. The forty-five-minute drive to the office was not just transit; it was, for many people, the only unscheduled time in their day—a forced, traffic-enforced intermission between roles.

The predictions were right that we could work from anywhere. They were quiet on the subject of whether "anywhere" would eventually come to mean "everywhere, all the time, please respond to this Slack message."

The commute is back, by the way. Hybrid schedules have refilled the highways on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The parking lots are operational. The necktie industry remains, as always, fine.