Rush hour occurs because many people start and end work at roughly the same time, but what makes it so horrible is that they live far away from where they work, and spend a long time getting there. Thus the people who leave home at 7:30 are still on the road when the people who leave at 8:00 start driving, and the road gets crowded, which makes it even slower. Come 8:15, the 7:30 people still haven't reached work, and more cars are pouring onto the roads. We have a positive feedback loop here. Now, a positive feedback loop can work both ways. Many years ago, I used to work within a mile of where I lived. I would walk (yes, walk) the whole way in ten minutes, and arrive in a pretty good mood. Imagine if most people could get to work in ten minutes! The people who used to leave home at 7:30 "to beat rush hour" could wait until 7:45, and would still be able to vacate the road in time for the 8:00 people to have full use of it. If commutes were short, we could get a lot more people to work, over the same amount of road.
Trouble is, most people don't want to live that close to work because they can get a bigger place five miles further away. Or a yet bigger place ten miles away. Or an even bigger place twenty miles away, with a real back yard. Mind you, this means that after eight hours at work, eight hours for sleep and personal hygiene, two hours commuting, and some yard work besides, they don't actually have much time to enjoy the bigger place (and are too tired and grumpy to do so after driving home), but hey, it's the American Dream, it's going to make them rich, and they get a tax break on the mortgage. So when we build more roads and widen a few existing ones, people decide they can now live thirty miles away in a really spacious place, which they have even less time to enjoy (and more yard work to do).
What we have here is a negative feedback loop. We can build roads, or paint carpool lanes, or do anything that makes for shorter commutes, and after a year or two there will be an increase in land values in the places that used to be out of reach for commuting to the Googleplex. Some people will have decided that they can now afford that spacious house, and have not really reckoned with the cost of the extra commute in money, time, and temper.
What else is there to do? I don't imagine that more meetings will help much. Driverless cars may well increase the effective capacity of freeways, but such an increase will quickly fall victim to the negative feedback loop, pushing property values up until commutes are, once again, just barely bearable. The same applies to mass transit: a bus or a train is, from the commuter's point of view, a very large self-driving car. Ask people to take jobs closer to where they live? Good luck with that! Having the best possible job is important. (I must admit to commuting twenty miles. I do value my job.) Telepresence? It works for some jobs, some of the time; not enough, not yet.
One fix that is gaining some traction is denser housing, which I can see being built in many places. Simple geometry permits people to live closer to work (or to mass transit) if they live closer to each other, and perhaps they'll even get rich out of it. In fact, if rush hour gets worse, it would be hard not to get rich out of owning a place that allows of a short commute.
I still live in the house we bought twenty years ago, but I haven't traded up to a place with a spacious back yard. My kids don't need a back yard to play in: they have YouTube. Telepresence, you might call it.
[This is adapted from something I wrote on Quora a year or two ago.]
