[Certified]

I had a long talk with a Chicago born cab driver when visiting a few years back. He explained to me that Chicago used to be a conventional city where the businesses were downtown and residential was a donut around that. Traffic was congested into downtown in the mornings and out of downtown in the evenings. As the city grew and commutes into downtown from the suburbs worsened, the businesses started moving out of downtown into the suburbs to be closer to their employees. This left downtown with low occupancy. A few people eventually got wise to the situation and started turning a lot of the unused downtown commercial space into residential space. Fast forward to today and the traffic patterns have reversed, with congestion out of downtown in the morning as people commute out towards the ring of businesses and into downtown in the evening where people now live.

I see this same trend happening in Houston where I live now and I suspect it is happening in other large car-centric cities as well.

[dave78]

I live in the Chicago area and this is just not true on a large scale at all. The commute into downtown Chicago on a weekday morning is extremely busy (especially pre-COVID), whether by car or rail. The reverse direction is nearly empty. Even as I write this at 9:15am (with rush hour ebbing), you can see this for yourself on Google Maps - the inbound lanes on all the highway arteries are all orange/red, the outbound lanes are all green.

For a long time, my office was always in the suburbs. Out of the 100s of people I knew in the office, I only ever heard of maybe a dozen living in the city and reverse commuting. They were always fresh out of college, and all gave up that lifestyle after a couple years because commuting out to the suburbs each day is challenging and time-consuming (no easy way to get from the rail station to the office, for instance).

Our company decided to move their headquarters into the city "to attract younger talent" a few years before COVID. What actually happened is that over the course of several years, the vast majority of people assigned to the new downtown office slowly stopped coming in at all and now nearly everyone works from home, and COVID of course only accelerated that. The younger people that live in the city are almost always on Zoom when they join meetings so it doesn't seem like they're taking advantage of the office much either now. Also, there were a small number of people who lived in the suburbs but favored city life who moved back into the city when the office moved there. However, anecdotally every single one of them that I know moved back out to the suburbs in 2020/2021 because they all became trapped in their small apartments with nowhere else to go because Chicago shut everything down for an extended period of time. Now that things are open again, no one that I know has moved back, and our office downtown is still a ghost town. On the rare occasion I've gone in, it's not uncommon to be the only person present on an entire floor of the building. I don't know how long the lease is but I have to imagine we'll scale way back on the space when it expires.

[muttled]

I wonder what the transit modes look like on a macro scale for those who move downtown. Anecdotally, it seems common for those who move to downtown Chicago to get rid of their car as a spot in a safe area can easily run $300 a month, and with a payment, maintenance, and insurance it really adds up. Being so close to all the major train lines, I myself have switched entirely to public/shared transit.

[phil21]

> Fast forward to today and the traffic patterns have reversed, with congestion out of downtown in the morning as people commute out towards the ring of businesses and into downtown in the evening where people now live.

Not really true in my experience, having been around here for going on 20 years.

If anything, businesses had been (pre-covid) moving suburban campuses to downtown locations over that time.

The commute into the city in the AM, and out at PM is still the worst. Although worse may not look like much of a difference many days if you're not from around here.

Patterns have certainly shifted some after covid, but not enough to flip the commute as described.

[Certified]

I’m really pleased to get a local rebuttal. The conversation I spoke of happened a little over a decade ago and I’ve been curious ever since if it was a momentary perspective or a longer term trend. Did you see anything around 10 years ago that would agree with my cab driver’s thesis or was he off base then as well?

[phil21]

Sorry I missed this. I think perhaps 30-40 years ago the cabbie would have had a point, but a weak one. If he was around back then he probably watched people and companies leaving the city.

The past 20 years have been the opposite though - suburban campuses relocating downtown, and at least on the North side of the city you saw a ton of urban renewal during that time. While Chicago saw net population loss, it saw a lot of growth elsewhere in the city.

You came across one of the more common "wives tale" tropes cabbies will tell you though. I've probably heard similar a dozen times over the years. You just nod and smile :)

[HDThoreaun]

This really just is not true. If anything the opposite is happening. Pre pandemic at least suburban office parks had been closing and moving employees into the city en mass. Downtown certainly hasn’t fully recovered from covid, but commute traffic is back to stand still levels and the train is back to standing room only.

[mikeryan]

So SF is interesting, I grew up here. In the early days of the internet I always considered the oracle buildings the northern edge of SV. Took a developer job at TechTV in SF in 99 when SOMA was known as “multimedia gulch” and had a reverse commute from Portola Valley to SF. Mid 2000 SV extended into SF as more of the new Unicorns, Twitter and Zynga (who moved into the office space on Townsend where I had worked) were early ones with the rise of Social Media. That shifted the commute patterns both ways and led to the start of the Google bus.

Patterns haven’t seemed to reverse really but it’s still easier these days to commute I the Bay Area then it was pre-pandemic.