The drive to work used to be an accepted part of life. Getting into a car and fighting traffic to get to the office, then doing the same thing in reverse to get home, was simply understood as the cost of having a job.
But more and more younger employees—Gen Z and younger millennials—are bucking this trend and choosing public transit instead. There are a few reasons behind the shift, one being a different way of thinking about getting to work or anywhere else. Unlike previous generations, it’s not about how they get there, it’s just getting there that matters. To that end, they move through a mix of ridesharing, e-scooters, buses, trains, and more. They see themselves as users, not owners, of transportation.
The auto industry is already responding, pivoting from manufacturing singular products to diversifying into commercial vehicles like electric buses, delivery vans, and autonomous shuttles.
Beyond the options now available to commuters, there’s also the matter of cost: getting to work by car puts real financial strain on the workforce. In fact, commuting has become unaffordable for some American workers, says Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and an expert in work-from-home trends. He tells CNN that the share of days worked from home ticked up to an average of 26.2 percent in March and April 2026, compared to 24.6 percent in January and February, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes.
“It’s just allowing employees here and there to take an extra day at home,” says Bloom. This reflects real economic pressure; employees are becoming willing to look for another job if they’re required to come in every day, simply because they can’t afford to.
It may not be commuters’ first concern, but there’s also the environmental impact of the transportation we choose. It’s hard to argue that roadways clogged with single-occupant cars do less damage to the environment than trains moving large numbers of people to and from city centres.
Of course, transportation done right doesn’t just help commuters and the environment; it delivers real economic benefits. Reliable transit can expand labour markets and drive a city’s economy, because better transit doesn’t only move people; it helps cities make the most of their districts and neighbourhoods. That includes commercial corridors, where businesses cluster together so people can reach multiple destinations from a single stop. There’s also a supply chain benefit: more transit running efficiently means fewer cars congesting the streets, which improves deliveries to businesses.
Those are some of the impacts for individual cities, but what if we took one giant step further?
In North America, transit planning is largely focused within individual cities. What if we expanded that thinking beyond single systems and connected our major cities through fast transit, making it feasible to live in one city and work in another? This goes well beyond suburbs or sleeper communities close to a larger hub. What about connecting two major urban centres through true high-speed transportation? What would the benefits look like?
It’s really a story of scale. Benefits like a larger labour market ripple outward, impacting both family finances and the environment. Economists call this the agglomeration effect: clusters of businesses and people coming together as a network. As that network grows, costs go down while efficiency and productivity improve. The interesting catch is that these benefits have limits when confined to a single city, even a large or mega-sized one, because gridlock eventually caps the economic upside of supporting all those workers.
Removing that gridlock through high-speed travel could unlock significant expansion of all these benefits while also cutting the environmental cost of mass transit. It already works elsewhere: countries around the globe are integrating advanced transit into their economies to boost productivity and move people efficiently over long distances.
One of the best examples is the shinkansen, Japan’s bullet train and the world’s first high-speed rail system. It dates back to 1964, when the country hosted the Olympic Games, and now carries hundreds of millions of passengers across Japan’s main islands.
The system is famous for two things: speed and punctuality. The trains reach speeds of up to 320 km/h and run no more than two minutes off schedule, even including weather-related delays. It’s a remarkably high-performing, efficient way to travel between cities, and it also holds a zero-fatality safety record.
Translated into North American terms, a similar bullet train system would make the trip from Chicago to New York take about four hours on an optimal route. Right now, that same trip takes roughly 22 hours by Amtrak.
Because all that speed comes from electricity rather than fossil fuel, there’s a climate benefit too, especially when comparing the costs and emissions of high-speed electric trains to regional flights. That comparison is often measured in passenger miles traveled (PMT), or passenger kilometers traveled (PKT), which combines the number of passengers in transit with the distance they travel to gauge how effective a transit system is. As an example: a city bus carrying 20 passengers over five miles equates to 100 passenger miles traveled. A plane carrying 150 passengers across 2,500 miles adds up to 375,000 PMT.
Right now, airplanes are the undisputed champions of PMT in North America, accounting for nearly 100 billion PMT—240 times more than trains. But that comes at a real cost.
For short-haul flights, generally between 600 and 900 miles (much like our Chicago-to-New York example), carbon dioxide emissions run as high as 255 grams per passenger kilometer, or about 14.4 ounces per passenger mile traveled. That’s largely due to the extra fuel burned during takeoff and climb to cruising altitude. Compare that to high-speed electric trains, which produce only six grams per passenger kilometer over the same distance.
Another Japanese innovation is maglev (short for magnetic levitation) now in development for a potential route between Tokyo and Nagoya.
A maglev train doesn’t use traditional fuel at all. Instead, superconducting magnets levitate the train roughly four inches off the ground and accelerate it with a magnetic field. Without friction between wheels and track, much higher speeds become possible—maglev is projected to reach up to 500 km/h. That’s how a 22-hour Chicago-to-New York trip could become a two-hour-and-25-minute one.
Enerpac notes the trade-offs involved in the infrastructure: “While Maglev requires less physical maintenance, it relies on specialized equipment and precise alignment which may require advanced solutions. Traditional rail, by contrast, requires more intensive maintenance to replace physical components, so these trade-offs need to be weighed carefully when calculating long-term costs.
So what could this mean if North America adopted high-speed trains or even maglevs?
A network of maglevs or other high-speed trains could solve the problem of short-haul flights for routes where the distance is too far to drive but too short to justify flying. Beyond boosting productivity and efficiency, such a system could reshape how we manage aviation altogether. Airlines could scale back short-haul flights, which aren’t particularly profitable, and focus on maximizing long-haul routes. Even better, none of these systems would run on fossil fuels; they’d draw from a grid powered by nuclear energy alongside solar and other clean sources. In essence, we could move millions of people between cities without leaving behind a large carbon footprint. On the ground, road maintenance could also drop as fewer semi-trucks haul materials over long distances.
Most people would benefit from no longer needing a vehicle just to hold down a job and no longer being stuck in the gridlock that hampers travel in and around cities. As younger consumers reshape conventional travel patterns, North America has an opportunity to operate differently, in a way that better protects the planet.
