Distance isn’t quite dead. It’s being defined and justified. And it remains a burden.
By Frederick Pilot
September 11, 2025
In her book The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Is Changing our Lives, (Rev. 2001) Frances Cairncross posited the rapid and widespread adoption of information and telecommunications technologies (ICT) would render physical distance an “irrelevant” or “imperceptible” concept. She argued that the drastic reduction in the cost and time of transmitting information would become the most significant economic force to reshape society in the first half of the 21st century. In other words, it would be so easy to move bytes – digital information – there would be no need to move bodies to create and process it.
In order to slow disease and death arising from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, government health agencies issued social distancing recommendations. Knowledge organizations complied by leaving centralized commuter offices vacant and having staff work from home or other locations.
What they didn’t do deal a final death blow to distance that Cairncross predicted a decade earlier.
While the pandemic didn’t kill distance, it did lead to knowledge organizations defining it in their employment policies. Exhibit A is the return to office attendance mandates. They defined distance for the purpose of determining who would have to return to the centralized commuter office (CCO) and when.
The metric: “reasonable” commute distance between a knowledge worker’s home and the CCO. Obtained from metro area or census data on commute distance. The definition varies but falls around 50 miles or one hour. Those who reside farther out are exempt from in office attendance requirements. As for when, that could be two to four days a week in the CCO.
The practical effect is organizations remain geographically centered as they have been historically for decades. The Puget Sound area for Microsoft. For Dell, Austin. Seattle and Amazon. In the public sector, Washington DC and state capitals. Knowledge workers are likely to meet colleagues and build professional networks and referrals to work opportunities by virtue of proximity.
Cairncross pointed to this agglomeration effect to revoke her death sentence on distance. But it’s not a binary matter of the life or death of distance. Agglomeration drives transportation demand that produces traffic congestion that make distance burdensome for knowledge workers by virtue of the time and expense it incurs to bridge it. It also drives housing demand and costs that increase distance as workers seek more affordable housing at the edges of metro areas and adjoining exurbs.
ICT eliminates the burden of distance by delinking knowledge work and transportation demand. The challenge for organizations is to determine how to best leverage it for that purpose while choosing co-located work wisely and with clear purpose.
Frederick, thank you for sharing. Having lived in several metropolitan areas, I have learned that a one-hour drive might get you 50 miles down the road, but in other places, perhaps 25 miles takes an hour to drive.
Good point that shows the shortcomings of this approach.