Figured it out, the locations object should have been called locations_attributes to match up with the Rails nested object creation naming scheme. After doing that, it works perfectly with a default Rails controller.
{
"commute": {
"minutes": 0,
"startTime": "Wed May 06 22:14:12 EDT 2009",
"locations_attributes": [
{
"latitude": "40.4220061",
"longitude": "40.4220061"
}
]
}
}