Closer to work where? To a close-in suburb that doesn't want apartment buildings ruining their detached home values and neighborhood character? Or to an urban neighborhood that doesn't want to be gentrified and displaced?
Without solving zoning, "move closer to work" is zero sum advice. All you can do is switch places with someone poorer than you.
Or, as many do today, companies will keep much of their office space in the suburbs both because of rent prices and because it’s where most of their employees including execs want to live.
I commutes into the relatively nearby city both by rail and car at one point. Wouldn’t have done it long term and probably wouldn’t again without buying a small property in the city for during the week.
Added: Companies will do whatever makes business sense. But potential employees who would find commuting into a city location a nightmare is a factor. As of course is new grads who insist on a location they can get to without a car.
Hopefully that dream will be the self driving car bringing you to kiss-and-ride and then going home, not bringing you all the way downtown. Otherwise everyone's congestion problems just got 2x as bad (and that's before you account for the current mass transit users who may suddenly decide that personal automobile use is more attractive now that you can pay for your empty car to drive off to cheap/free parking instead of paying for a downtown spot).
What you describe would be a temporary problem - tolls for entering the city would appear out of necessity (see London for a present day example). Life would go on as before except for a bunch of now outraged self driving car owners, mass transit would still be terrible (this is the US after all), and the bickering over parking minimums, zoning, gentrification, etc would continue unaffected with no end in sight (the same as at present).
Or perhaps we'd finally get our act together and build out functional mass transit, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Right. But in the future you won't be able to drive in. So move closer to work, I guess.