The Lengthening Rush Hour(s)

If you have a daughter in college who's thinking about careers, here's a thought: Advise her to become a transportation planner. Why would that be a good career choice? Because just about everything we thought we knew about how people move through cities is changing. Her advantage: When she graduates, she won't have to unlearn anything.

One example of the head-turning changes in mobility: People are rising so early to drive into cities that, in many places, rush hour now begins before 6 a.m. The Wall Street Journal interviewed one man who until recently met his carpool at 4:15 a.m., arrived at work at Washington, D.C.'s Dulles Airport at 5:20 and then . . . took a nap. His wife called at 6 a.m. to tell him it was time to start work. (Alas, his wee-hour carpool broke up recently, but he's looking for another.) Why would someone do this? To beat traffic, he told the Journal.

He's not the only one. "We've seen extraordinary growth in the percentage of the population that is leaving home before 6 a.m.," the author of a recent study of America commuting patterns told the newspaper. How much growth? About half of all new commuters since 1990 travel in off-peak hours, before 7 or after 9 a.m.

This is changing the way a lot of businesses operate, starting with public transit. Washington's Metrorail system now starts up at 5 a.m., a half-hour earlier than it did two years ago. Seattle's Sound Transit commuter trains pull out of the Tacoma station starting at 5:45 a.m. When the line was launched six years ago, first trains left at 6:20.

Other services aimed at commuters are waking up earlier, too. Nearly all Caribou Coffee shops on the East Coast now open at 5:30 a.m., the Journal reported, and the vast majority of McDonald's restaurants open their doors and drive-throughs by 5.

But the lengthening rush hour isn't the only change. New York's Metro-North Railway, a commuter service that runs north to Westchester County, then angles over to Greenwich, Conn., recently disclosed an interesting statistic: Fewer than half its riders now board at suburban stations and head into the city in the mornings or make the reverse trip in the evenings. So who's catching the train if it isn't commuters headed for Manhattan? Increasingly, it's people headed out of the city for work in the 'burbs, workers traveling from one suburb to another, and off-hours riders headed for the city for fun.

This milestone (49.3 percent now follow the traditional commuter route, down from 65.3 percent in 1984) is "kind of a benchmark that shows what has been building over the last several years and demonstrates the way the region is changing: more job growth in the suburbs and more diverse commuting patterns," one urban researcher told the New York Times.

Well, yes, but here's the twist: The rail service's ridership is at a 23-year high. So we're not seeing fewer of the traditional commuters on the Metro-North but rather others who've figured out ways of using the commuter service. (Some credit belongs to Metro-North's management, which has been skillful in marketing to these non-traditional riders.)

So perhaps the lesson here is the surprising adaptability of rail transit. Where we once thought of commuter lines and transit in general as good at only one thing — hauling workers from the 'burbs to the city — it turns out they're good at a number of things. But, hey, that's probably something your 19-year-old daughter could have told you.