Economists once assumed that workers would trade a longer commute only for higher pay, treating travel time as a cost like any other. But when the sociologist Reva Halloran surveyed two thousand commuters across four midsize cities, she found a stubborn puzzle: many people who could have moved closer to work chose not to, even when doing so would have saved them money and an hour each day. When she interviewed them, a pattern emerged. The commute, they told her, was the only stretch of the day that belonged to no one else. Parents of small children spoke of the train as a rolling sanctuary; caregivers described the drive home as a decompression chamber between two sets of demands. Halloran concluded that the commute was not merely a cost to be minimized but, for some, a boundary to be preserved—a buffer that the tidy models had mistaken for pure waste. Her finding did not overturn the older theory so much as expose its blind spot: by counting only minutes and dollars, it had missed the value of a threshold, a neutral zone that neither home nor workplace could claim.