...and at 80% the remaining gap hitting CR and ferry hardest can be standard-issue attributed to the economic recession. Proportionately that's about the size of the dinger in any economic downturn, so by that point we're more or less dealing in conventional wisdom once more. This will be a longer-lasting downturn for sure, but the properties of it won't be anything strange or novel to us for how those lagging indicators behave.
Total post-COVID recovery shifts in telecommuting would be lost in the statistical noise of projected annual congestion increases in a 'regular' workforce, so the world being changed by this whole saga doesn't mean that the recovery prospects of that malingering last 20% is any big crapshoot. Maybe WFH changes make the last 10% of recovery a little slower and more stubborn with the most-affected modes, maybe not. Any which way congestion effects will be stiffly reasserting themselves once more when we're inside that 85th-90th percentile, so we'll be back to largely the same commute stressors as before determining demand & behavior regardless of whether the office environment sees lasting changes. But enough fatigued employers have also sounded-off in the last couple months now on how WFH is such a much poorer substitute for the real thing with limitations on its shelf life (esp. for large-scale employee engagement) that--despite where you might land on the sliding scale of predicted permanent shifts--it's pretty clear by now we're not looking at a full-on "The office is O-V-A-H!" level total sea change like some were boldly predicting after Q1 of the pandemic a few months ago. The remaining unknowns there kind of slot within the boundaries of traditional decade-shift generational changes in work habits. We've been through that before. To WFH vs. To Not WFH probably won't be too cosmically off-scale a change as recurring generational shifts go.
