I'm more surprised the average American only commutes 1 hr (total?) each day to work. Considering most cities during rush hour seem like they take 30 minutes to go 5 miles, and most Americans cannot afford to live near prosperous jobs.
That being said, a fair amount of transit cities are also multipolar and with generally long commutes; Paris and Tokyo come to mind.
They often can't avoid very congested trips to the neighboring suburb where their job is located. Even if many jobs aren't located downtown, they are located in suburban industrial or office clusters that severely lack in public transit, and are subject to severe traffic congestion.
Furthermore, the effect of this increasing dispersal of jobs has been to increase average commute times, not decrease them [1].
Anecdotally, over my career, I've experienced this sort of long suburb-to-suburb commute in states as varied as Michigan, Texas, Washington and California.
1. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Srvy_Jo...