The sprawling of many postwar American cities has made the movement of massive numbers of people from home to work, school and other places an everyday planning nightmare, especially when done by car. Nevertheless, while mass commuting is constantly proposed as a solution to resultant dilemmas of cost, time and pollution, it is not an effective reality in most cities.

Some metropolitan areas, in fact, have inherited infrastructures of subways, trains and streetcars that, with buses, underpin extensive and viable systems in New York City, Boston, MA, Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA—although the latter is continually losing ridership. Other cities have invested in subway—bus combinations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century including Atlanta, GA, San Francisco, CA, Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD and Los Angeles, CA; some of these systems are only skeletal. Light-rail systems have also gained popularity as investments in Miami, FL and Portland, OR.

Yet, much of mass commuting in the end seeks to ameliorate the impact of the automobile through car-pooling, high-occupancy lanes on highways and incentives/disincentives for employers. Transportation-oriented development, in the longer run, may systematize connections to reduce automotive dependence, but American lifestyles and choices make effective mass commuting a tough sell politically and economically.