Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham was designed along these lines. It's very tranquil, but difficult to go anywhere for lunch as the drive just takes too long. Which might have been part of the master plan all along...
It wasn't just getting food, though that was certainly a hassle whenever I was visiting that office. It was also the infeasibility of finding a place to live that would leave me with less than an hour total time spent in the car per day. Let alone a location that would let me walk or take a bus to work, which is my strong preference. I'm in a dense city now, and my total commute is admittedly longer than an hour, but half of it is walking and the other half is reading a book or knitting, so it hardly ever feels like a waste of time.
[Edit: clarified round trip.]
Even all the way from Durham you can be in Wilmington in 2 hours and a few minutes.
4 hours will get you almost all the way to Charleston, SC which is way way way far away.
Man, really want to travel to Shanghai one day, but just really don't have 24 hours
One of the things that Raleigh & Wake County has really done well is create the network of greenway trails. If it works for you, it's entirely possible to use them to commute on a bike.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
...as for the U.S. Dollar argument. Previously on Hacker news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455681
J.D. Rockfeller II was a notorious Social Darwinist ( the founder of some Social Hygiene organization so probably also a eugenicist ). Eugenics was a Progressive idea.
Many company owners - Henry Ford being one of them - ran company towns for Progressive/Utopian reasons.
Some mining towns would not have existed had the miners had to have arranged their own housing and depend on random strangers to provide supply.
Of course some had to "sold their soul to the company store" but it's like most things - a spectrum and not a given. And it was not all just about greed. It was more likely to be about stubbornness, anyway.