The widespread adoption of neural interface technology in GLMZ has created a transit category that physical infrastructure planners struggle to account for: the neural commute. For approximately 340,000 residents — almost exclusively Tier-One and upper Tier-Two, employed in cognitive-labor sectors — the daily trip to a physical workplace has been partially or wholly replaced by telepresence transit: high-bandwidth neural uplink sessions that render physical presence at a work location unnecessary. The implications for the city's physical transit infrastructure are significant, contested, and distributed unequally across the population.

Neural telepresence at work-quality fidelity requires bandwidth and latency specifications that are only available through premium mesh-node subscriptions or corporate-grade direct uplink infrastructure. The experience — proprioceptive, visual, auditory, with limited haptic feedback — is described by regular users as genuinely immersive rather than a degraded approximation of physical presence. Caldor's NeuroPresence platform and Harmon's CogLink service are the dominant commercial offerings; both are priced above the monthly income of a Tier-Three worker. The population for whom neural commuting is a realistic daily option is thus a narrow, economically elevated slice of the megacity. For everyone else, physical transit remains obligatory.

The uneven adoption of neural commuting has produced visible effects on the physical transit system. Spine Corridor ridership data shows a plateau in Tier-One commuter trips since 2168, coinciding with the mass-market rollout of NeuroPresence. Velorant has responded by aggressively lobbying against any expansion of high-bandwidth mesh access to lower-tier districts — a policy position it publicly frames as spectrum management but which transparently protects the ridership revenue from Tier-Two and Tier-Three commuters who cannot afford neural telepresence and thus remain dependent on physical transit. The result is a deliberate bandwidth scarcity that keeps physical commuting economically necessary for most of the city while the infrastructure revenues depend on that necessity.

There is also a labor dimension that the neural commute has not resolved as its proponents suggested it would. The concentration of neural telepresence among cognitive workers does not affect the transit dependency of the city's vast service, maintenance, logistics, and care labor workforce, who by definition must be physically present to do their work. The city's 1.8 million physical-presence-required workers continue to rely on Spine Corridors, ground-level autonomous fleets, and Vertical shafts — systems that have seen reduced investment precisely because their primary users are not the population whose preferences shape infrastructure policy. The neural commute has, in effect, allowed the city's most influential residents to exit the experience of daily physical transit, removing a constituency that might otherwise have advocated for its improvement.