Three years ago, before she became a pioneer on the transportation frontier, Justy Mayernik did what millions of other commuters do-and hated it. She spent two to three hours each weekday driving between her home southeast of Seattle and her job as a teller at a Key Bank 30 miles north-adding her straw to a staggering load of traffic congestion, air pollution, and costly demands on the transportation infrastructure. She and her husband once lived closer to her workplace, but had moved to one of the last spots in that booming region where they could still afford a house.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Mayernik, another teller, George Nelson, was driving nearly as far from his home north of Seattle to a Key Bank branch just 20 minutes from Mayernik's home. Justy and George might still be passing on the interstate, if an environmental consultant named Gene Mullins hadn't gotten trapped in a daily commuting nightmare after his office moved from Seattle, where he lived, to the suburbs. "I thought there ought to be a better way to match up where people live and where they work," Mullins recalls. While staring at his frazzled counterparts commuting in the opposite direction, he found himself musing that "it's too bad we can't just switch sites."

Such a switch might not work for a specialized professional like Mullins, who soon quit the long commute and started his own firm anyway. But he began to hear about people who worked in jobs that were likely to be interchangeable with others much closer to their homes. For example, he knew of a data-entry clerk who was driving 60 miles from Seattle to work in Olympia and a receptionist, two tellers, and a truck driver who were traveling nearly as far from Mount Vernon to Seattle.

Mullins had stumbled on a critical fact that transportation planners overlook: proximity is often the last thing companies consider in hiring and placing employees. Workers may seek jobs near their homes, but they take what they can get. "Once people are situated, they tend not to think about where they could be," says Laurie Turner, human resource manager at Key Bank. And even when they do think about it, they often find that their employers aren't set up to accommodate them.