A shower, a quick cup of coffee, a kiss goodbye (if they're lucky), and they're off. Keys are inserted in ignitions, train doors slide open, feet hit the sidewalk, and it begins: that great mass migration from home to work known as the American commute. In its scale and dynamism, it resembles an awesome natural phenomenon—a volcanic eruption or a flood—but viewed up close, it consists of millions of individuals impelled by private preoccupations. They may move as a herd, but they don't feel that they're part of one as they check voicemail, ponder crossword puzzles, or just doze off. And though they may sense that they're part of something big, much of the time they feel acutely alone, even when the subway car is jammed, the overhead bins of the small jet can't accommodate another carry-on, and the carpool lane is bumper to bumper, backed up behind a wreck. (View Vincent Laforet's portraits of commuting.)

Given these disorienting conditions, commuters may not realize that the patterns of their movements are changing. The trends are subtle in some cases, but they alter our stereotypes about this defining national ritual. As depicted in countless books and movies, from the fiction of John Cheever (the laureate of New York City's Grand Central Terminal and its harried, briefcase-toting company men) to movies such as Falling Down (Michael Douglas goes bananas in L.A. traffic, abandons his car, and shoots a bunch of people), morning rush hour is our cultural equivalent of teatime in Britain.

But nothing stays the same forever. Take the rise of reverse commuting, in which workers swarm outward from cities to suburbs. According to a study of American commuting by professor Alan Pisarski, the frequency of such unconventional trips has more than doubled since 1990. Why? Because jobs are spreading out in much the same way that housing did in the early age of sprawl.

Trips from suburb to suburb, called cross-commuting, are increasing too. Often these treks bypass the urban cores that, in the old days, would have been their target. This conjures up the image of two skylines standing way off in the distance, seemingly obsolete, while thousands of travelers ignore them, bound for less cluttered horizons. Of course, the landscapes we commute across are also changing. As dairy farms are converted into semiconductor assembly plants, places that were neither here nor there are becoming economic hubs, with parking lots where feedlots used to be.

Another new trend seems to defy the climbing price of oil as well as the human body's need for rest: the upsurge in "extreme commuting." The number of us who spend more than 90 minutes in the limbo of neither-home-nor-work has grown twofold since 1990. Spending hundreds of dollars on gas each month clearly strikes a lot of people as a good deal when it means smaller mortgage payments. And it's an easier deal to make now, given the advent of satellite radio, smartphones, and other devices that allow commuters to fill what used to be dead time with lots of electronic sound and fury, and maybe even get some work done before the workday has properly commenced—or after it has allegedly finished.

Indeed, these long commutes may not be commutes at all, but a mobile swing shift. Many people get more work done on their short-hop flights than they do when they reach headquarters. With no intrusive boss over their shoulder or coughing co-worker at their elbow, they find that concentration is finally possible, not to mention creativity. This makes sense. It's hard to think outside the box when you're in a box (the office), and maybe the mind is freer on tube-shaped high-speed trains or, say, while exposed to fresh air atop a bicycle. That's my brother's theory. A paralegal for a mammoth insurance company, he spends three hours pedaling 20 miles each way between St. Paul and Minneapolis. On his outbound trip he plans his tasks, and riding home he evaluates his results. What does he do at the office? He mostly sits and types stuff. It's an office, after all.

One of the more melancholy conclusions that can be drawn from Pisarski's study is that we're not as virtuous as we think when it comes to green forms of transport that should be the wave of the future. Except among low-income workers, who presumably have little choice but to share expenses, carpooling is no more popular today than it was when gas was $2 a gallon. And outside of the largest Northeastern cities, where rail commuting has been common for decades, taking the train, or even the bus, is still not how we roll as Americans. One-fifth of the working households that have no car are in the New York City area, and while there has been some increase in the number of carless households all across the land (about a quarter-million of them now), this seems to be due, the experts believe, not to idealism but to immigration. No driver's license, no Chevrolet.

And as commuting changes, so do commuters, because transportation is transformative and human beings are molded by their motions. It's no wonder, for example, that Americans are getting fatter: We're walking less, at least to work and back. Pedestrian commuting is half as popular now as it was in 1980. And there's no indication that by 2010, the sight of a person swiftly strolling along while swinging a briefcase won't be as rare a sight as that of a pod of humpback whales surfacing in the harbor of Newark, New Jersey. Much more common, the statistics tell us, will be the spectacle of senior-citizen drivers tooling nearsightedly down expressways that are also wearing out. If the trends hold, they'll be driving alone, these oldsters, listening to whatever is then considered classic rock. (Radiohead, Beyoncé, Beck?)

In our ever-evolving society, just how adaptable we must be was demonstrated to me not long ago when I was setting out to leave Los Angeles at 3 a.m., hoping to beat traffic. The L.A. native I was staying with warned me against the decision. "You'll get stuck," he said, "in the wee-hours rush hour." He explained that the myriad commercial vehicles that supply the city with food and other goods create this bizarre nocturnal congestion. I didn't believe him. I got into my car. An hour later, I believed him: I was still trapped inside city limits.

What's the commuter of the future to do? I don't know, but I have fantasies. Maybe our cars will become our offices, or maybe our offices will be built on wheels and come to us, like ambulances or bookmobiles. As for the much-vaunted innovations of telecommuting and flextime that were supposed to be the norm by now for certain professions, perhaps we'll finally perfect them by wearing wireless multimedia headsets in bed, at the mall, and at the gym, ensuring that we're never disconnected from our masters' voices.

What a hellish heaven that would be: "commuting" as you run on a treadmill, watching your heart rate accelerate on a monitor as your boss swears at you while on a StairMaster somewhere else—or perhaps just around the corner from you. No longer will commuting mean getting someplace. Life and work will fuse, like gridlocked traffic, and people will be everywhere and nowhere—trapped in the most extreme commute of all.