Rush hour is back — but traffic patterns reveal that employees are redefining both the workday and the workweek, holding on to flexibility even as offices fill again.

getty

The commute has always been more than just traffic. It reflects how we organize our lives around work. Arity’s 2025 Driving Behavior Report makes that visible — and what it reveals is not a simple return to the old normal, but a redefinition of how and when we show up, work, and leave.

The morning commute is back. Rush hour is the busiest it has been since 2021. With many employers calling people back into the office, at least part of the week, mornings are once again synchronized. Workers align this not just with the start of the workday, but also with family routines like school drop-off.

But the end of the day looks very different. Instead of a sharp evening rush, departures now stretch across hours — signaling that while organizations control arrivals, employees have retained autonomy over departures.

The Midweek Core and Elastic Exit

Arity’s data shows commuting volume concentrating Tuesday through Thursday, while Mondays and Fridays remain lighter. Hybrid workers are structuring their week around a core midweek in-office collaboration window suggesting offices have become synchronization hubs, not five-day defaults.

This three-day office week clustering is echoed in Microsoft Work Trend Index special report, which revealed that Tuesdays carry the highest share of meetings while Fridays are the lightest. The office is not being rejected — it’s being repurposed into a high-intensity collaboration space.

At the same time, flexible departure times reveal a back end of the day where control shifts from employer to employee. While mornings are still collective, afternoons are personal. Workers come in together but leave on their own terms, using the flexibility to manage family responsibilities, personal commitments, or simply to decide when their “office day” ends.

This elasticity is also reshaping the workday itself. Research at Microsoft has documented the rise of a “triple-peak day”: work no longer comes in just two bursts, morning and afternoon, but also in a third evening peak as people log back in after dinner.

The flexible departures seen in Arity’s commute data mirror this phenomenon: the physical day ends earlier for many, but the workday continues later — distributed, asynchronous, and on employees’ own terms. The commute has become a transition point, not an ending. Leaving the office earlier no longer means work is finished; it means it continues when and where it fits best.

Longer Commutes, Lifestyle Choices

The report also highlights a bigger trend: commute distance and duration are both rising nationally. People are driving farther and spending more time in the car. This reflects a lingering pandemic effect: many workers moved farther away from office hubs during years of remote work and have not returned. Even with mandates pulling them back into physical offices, they are not giving up the lifestyle choices they made — whether larger homes, different communities, or a better quality of life outside urban cores.

But there are exceptions. Arity’s close look at Microsoft’s Redmond campus shows that in the past couple of years the average commute distance has dropped 18%, and average trip duration has shortened by 7%, while the number of trips has risen over 20%. Employees who already lived nearby are going in more often, while others may have moved closer in response to RTO pressure — trading long pandemic commutes for shorter but more frequent office visits.

So while people nationally are holding on to their lifestyle-driven moves, strong local mandates can still pull workers closer to offices.

The Evolving Social Contract of Work

The story the data tells is clear: we are not going back to the rigid five-day office week, nor to the neatly bounded nine-to-five. What is emerging instead is a new social contract of work — one that redefines both the workday and the workweek while preserving flexibility as non-negotiable.

For organizations, the lesson is not to fight this elasticity but to tap into it. Office time should be used for its highest purpose: connection, collaboration, problem-solving, and relationship-building. At the same time, companies need to invest in asynchronous tools and practices so deep work and communication can flow when people are not in the same place or the same hours. Above all, leaders must learn to design norms not around presence, but around outcomes, trust, and enabling people to do their best work wherever and whenever it happens.

The commute data may measure traffic, but what it really reveals is evidence of a profound rebalancing of control and trust. The future of work will not be built by dragging people back to the past, but by harnessing the rhythms employees have already chosen.