Comment by Supermancho

Ok, 3 is not typical. There is a behavioral reason for this. Like in most economic considerations, there's a tradeoff, where humans will tolerate a certain amount of time travel, for the money. So this tends to be stretched out to the maxima, over time.

Given driving time and train time, it's easily 2 hours of a commute in any of the top 20 metros for the majority of the population. From personal experience: Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County (just Santa Ana to Irvine!), or the rest of the inland empire was all 1.5 or more, each way. Ofc there will be less general cases around the nation, where you might characterize a "very small minority" opposed to what I would believe was 1/3 of the nation doing 2 hours total before WFH was popularized. Some people (including people we each know) still make these commutes.