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.