Super Commuters Take the Morning Plane

Most Monday mornings Karl Sparre is at Boston’s Logan International Airport grabbing an orange juice and a muffin before hopping a 7:20 a.m. flight. After he lands at Philadelphia International Airport at about 8:45 a.m., Sparre boards a 40-minute commuter train that deposits him downtown. If all goes according to plan, the 56-year-old executive is at his desk on the 23rd floor of the Aramark office tower before 10:00 a.m.

Sparre’s 300-mile odyssey of trains, planes, and automobiles qualifies him for membership in an expanding club of American workers. Professor Mitchell Moss at New York University calls them super commuters: men and women who work in a city far from where they reside—often 100 miles away or more. An analysis by Moss and his colleagues at NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation found that there are about 1.15 million such people living in 10 large U.S. metro areas—and their numbers are growing. From 2002 to 2009 the area surrounding Philadelphia saw a 50 percent increase; in the Houston area, they almost doubled. “It’s really a very, very big, but dispersed trend,” says Moss.