The city you currently live in chose to expand road capacity by building toll roads, rather than investing in usable public transport. It's lousy urban planning and your coworker is paying the price, unfortunately. That being said, your coworker could definitely make better housing choices.
Sometimes the housing choice is made for the benefit of the other spouse.
I'll use us as an example. My husband gets to enjoy that 10 minute walk OP has, but I have a 32 mile commute involving a tollway. Tolls are $4.50 or $5.20 per day (sometime I use a different route with highway + tollway on my way home because there's no traffic at that time).
Housing options would be:
1. Live by my office... which would eliminate my commute, but then put my husband in the same boat with the opposite direction of the problem.
2. Live somewhere in between... which would then necessitate two cars being driven all the time, rather than....
3. our current arrangement of ~20k miles/year on one car and ~1k miles on the other. (which is less that two of us driving the american average of 13.5k miles/ea)
So yeah, for our current stage in life, we can spend ~$5/day to save me 20-30 minutes of my commute. (And I maximized out how to get the most time savings per $, in true MMM style).