[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.