The reasons, though varied, tend to focus on quality of life.
“COVID changed the mindset of those who wanted to be farther away from other people,” Zach Kopinski told The Epoch Times.
He recently moved further away from his job at Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, to enjoy a new home with more acreage.
“I live in a small town of 168,000 people. I now drive five days a week a lot farther because of what my wife and I really wanted out of life and where we wanted to live,” Mr. Kopinski said.
He now drives for more than an hour each way to his job.
“I actually enjoy the drive because it allows me to clear my mind before I get home and it’s basically an easy route with only seven traffic lights,” Mr. Kopinski said.
His drive, in which he’s already put 30,000 miles on a truck he bought in the second half of 2023, pales in comparison to super commuters such as Kyle Rice, who regularly documents his train travel on TikTok.
A paramedic and father of two, Mr. Rice works for a tech company in New York City. He commutes to work from his home in Delaware because of, among other things, the cost of living, including the ability to have a smaller mortgage and lower taxes.
A super commuter is viewed as someone who travels long distances to work at least once or twice weekly by air, rail, bus, car, or a combination of those vehicles.
In a written statement, Mr. Rice told The Epoch Times that the money he makes in Manhattan is not comparable to what he could make nearer to home, and unlike remote work, he gets the social aspect.
“The biggest benefit is the pay and the ability to collaborate with people in person when needed,” he said.
According to the most recent information from the Bureau of Transportation, the average American commuter spends 25.6 minutes traveling each way to work.
However, according to the Stanford study, which examined vehicle GPS data, there was a considerable rise in the share of commute journeys of more than 40 miles across the 10 largest U.S. cities.
Of those cities, Washington and New York City had the largest increases in super commuters traveling more than 40 miles post-pandemic—up by 100 percent and 89 percent, respectively. Philadelphia and Miami also saw measurable increases in long commutes, rising by 28 percent and 6 percent, respectively.
The only city that saw a reduction in long commutes was Chicago, which was 4 percent lower than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think COVID opened the door to broadening our understanding of how work can be performed either remotely, locally, or at a distance while still maintaining a work-life balance that wasn’t considered before,” Mr. Rice said.
That factor was undoubtedly high on Mr. Kopinski’s priorities. A former rodeo rider and hockey player, he wanted to buy land to start his own small farm and realized that the prices near the Walmart offices in Bentonville were out of reach.
“The biggest thing for us was land prices, and we wanted some acreage. In 2019, a starter home near Bentonville was around $50,000, and now, it’s $310,00 and more with all the home bidding wars going on,” he said.
“We used to live 30 miles away from work, but acreage at that time went from $10,000 to $70,000. Now, we live a half-mile from the Oklahoma border on 10 acres near Cherokee Nation in the Ozarks. It’s perfect.”
