GOING THE DISTANCE Supercommuters and American car culture in tension with metropolitan identity in Rockford, IL

Supercommuters, or people whose commute times fall at the extreme upper end of typical commutes, account for an outsized portion of gasoline consumption and car dependence. Thus, accounting for supercommuters is crucial in addressing environmentally untenable transportation practices and deemphasizing car travel when reframing future urban development and identity. There is no scholarly consensus on the commute time or distance that defines a supercommute, so I rely here on interlocutors' self-definition as supercommuters between the Rockford, IL metropolitan area and greater Chicago (within Cook County). Existing research on commuting tends to focus either on the social experience of automobility, or on the historical and contemporary car-centric forces that shape the built environment; addressing why and how people participate in the extreme supercommute within the particular geographic context of the Rockford-Chicago commute reveals the values and suburban cultural logics that undergird this practice. This, in turn, allows the practice to be understood through simultaneous environmental and anthropological lenses. By undertaking an analysis of the experience and motivations of supercommuters between Rockford and Chicago in relation to Rockford's ongoing reflexive economic and urban development planning and practices, I address both the collective priorities that enable the daily physical grounding of supercommuting and the incongruities between these practices and Rockford's contemporary process of identity (re)formation. I argue that the suburban, automobile-reliant ideals that undergird supercommuters' logics run counter to the foundational principles of sustainable urban communities. Thus, development professionals' work in reorienting Rockford's identity towards a cohesive, locally-centered cosmopolitan and metropolitan area is situated in, and must contend with, the friction between this new paradigm and the suburban ideals which make supercommuting not only viable but voluntary.