As hybrid work schedules have become commonplace and the cost of living has ballooned since 2020, Dallas-area residents are trading longer commutes for suburban perks like more space and lower housing costs.
People who work in Dallas have added on average an extra 35 miles per trip to their commutes post-pandemic, with “super commuting” — over 75 miles — up 29%, a recent analysis by Stanford University researchers found. That’s in line with the nine other metropolitan areas the study examined, and likely due to the fivefold rise in the share of work conducted at home.
“[With hybrid work] you have three horrendous days that are two hours round commute, but then you don’t have to drive in the other two,” said Nick Bloom, co-author of the study. “That’s probably the same as living a half an hour out when you have to go in five days a week, and you get more space for your money by being further away.”
Researchers used GPS data from about 2 million trips to compare the last four pre-pandemic months — November 2019 to February 2020 — to the four months between November 2023 and February 2024. The study analyzed weekday journeys over 20 miles that began outside the city center and ended in downtown between 7 and 10 a.m.
While that may have excluded a lot of commuters, Bloom said, it was necessary to rule out shorter trips to places like school and retail stores. The study also accounted for population changes in each of the metro areas where commutes were analyzed.
A scattering of when people are going into the office means roads are emptier than they used to be and traffic speeds are up, making those long commutes faster. That’s good news for the roughly 80% who work fully in-person, too.
The findings are in line with trends regional transportation planners have noticed. North Texas’ suburban counties saw more population growth due to domestic migration than Dallas County last year, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“The morning peak period is not back to the morning peak period speeds pre-COVID, so that’s indicating to you we’re not all coming in [to the office] even though we have more population,” said Michael Morris, director of transportation at the North Central Texas Council of Governments, a regional planning body. “We’re probably 750,000 persons higher than pre-COVID but the morning peak is still faster.”
Evening congestion is up as people leave work later or those who have been working at home all day venture out to run errands.
The trend of long commutes is strongest among high earners, Bloom said, who likely moved farther out from city centers during the pandemic for more space at a lower cost. Hybrid and fully remote jobs are most prominent among college-educated workers, who get the benefits of flexibility that remote work provides.
“Rent and house prices have really surged since 2020 so if we can reduce the cost of that by allowing people to commute further, that’s really positive,” Bloom said.
As technology improvements allow office workers to do more remotely, commute times will likely remain high.
“Long commuters will always be permanent but it may not always be the same people,” Morris said. “I think their lifestyle will change or their needs will change depending on their family needs. Someone may take a job closer to where their home is and they no longer become a long commuter because they made a different housing choice or a different job choice as part of the equilibrium that they’re trying to solve.”
