I’ve often heard it said (though I haven’t been able to find a citation) that the maximum length of time for a commute to work is 40 minutes. Whether in ancient Rome or contemporary Toronto, whether by foot or by limo, 40 minutes is it. After that, people make changes: they move, they change jobs, they change mode of transport.
Well, it looks like Toronto has a minute to go. FromCanWest:
OTTAWA — Canadians are spending more of their lives getting to and from work – a whopping 12 days a year, according to a new study.
Based on data from the 2005 General Social Survey released by Statistics Canada on Wednesday, commuters spent an average of 63 minutes a day making the round trip, the equivalent of nearly 275 hours of commuting.
Toronto commuters topped the charts, with residents there suffering an average 79 minute round trip — roughly 340 hours a year or two solid weeks.
Then this:
Vancouver, on the other hand, has remained steady over the last decade,with round trip commutes holding at about 67 minutes last year.
Average travel time in Canada’s major cities:
Toronto — 79 minutes
Montreal — 76 minutes
Vancouver — 67 minutes
Ottawa-Gatineau — 65 minutes
Calgary — 66 minutes
Edmonton — 62 minutes
So how come Vancouver bucked the trend of increasing commute times? What’s going on here?
And here’s a prediction: after we spend approximately $3 to 4 billion on road ‘improvements’ to reduce congestion, commute times will start to increase in Vancouver.
Come on Prof Gordon… that’s a bit of a flaky prediction (commute times will go up) and one that is so general it will be impossible to verify. Indeed, making such a poorly crafted predication is not worthy of a SFU prof! Indeed, if you base your future viewpoint on validating that wishy-washy predication, you should be banished forever from such an esteemed scientific centre of higher learning!
How about devising a real test — one that is measureable and quantifiable — then standing by your thesis?
For example, you pick a starting location and ending location. You make ten or twenty trips to get an accurate measure of the average time of the trip. Then, repeat the experiment, using the same two locations, once the capital expenditure is finished. Then, repeat the experiment one year later.
Indeed, if you are correct, then so be it! Carry on! Predication validated.
If, however, your predication if wrong, a suitable “eat crow” event could be devised. For example, you could promise to dance around the median of Highway 1, wearing a “I was wrong and now I’m moving to the burbs and leaving my worldclass city behind forever” organic t-shirt with matching bicycle shorts if commute times decrease as a result of all that expenditure?
Come on Prof Gordon… that’s a bit of a flaky prediction (commute times will go up) and one that is so general it will be impossible to verify. Indeed, making such a poorly crafted predication is not worthy of a SFU prof! Indeed, if you base your future viewpoint on validating that wishy-washy predication, you should be banished forever from such an esteemed scientific centre of higher learning!
How about devising a real test — one that is measureable and quantifiable — then standing by your thesis?
For example, you pick a starting location and ending location. You make ten or twenty trips to get an accurate measure of the average time of the trip. Then, repeat the experiment, using the same two locations, once the capital expenditure is finished. Then, repeat the experiment one year later.
Indeed, if you are correct, then so be it! Carry on! Predication validated.
If, however, your predication if wrong, a suitable “eat crow” event could be devised. For example, you could promise to dance around the median of Highway 1, wearing a “I was wrong and now I’m moving to the burbs and leaving my worldclass city behind forever” organic t-shirt with matching bicycle shorts if commute times decrease as a result of all that expenditure?
predication =prediction
predication =prediction
I’ve heard that 40 minute commute statistic thrown around quite a bit, but have always poo-pooed it based on my own anecdotal experience from living in New York.
At my job in Manhattan’s financial district, most of my co-workers who had families lived outside of the city (in New Jersey or Long Island) and commuted over an hour each way. If you add a 10-12 hour day on top of that, I expect that you get a pretty miserable home life.
From my experience, this was typically the case that only the very rich or the very independent (ie- no children) can afford to live in Manhattan. Only the slightly less rich and the slightly less independent can afford to live in the outer boroughs. Everyone else must live outside the city or make big sacrifices to live inside its boundaries. Hence the long commutes.
Maybe New York is just an anomaly.
If the average stays the same over a given period of time, all that tells you is that the two extremes are balancing each other out to keep the average the same.
If the average (Metro) Vancouver commute is and has been 67 minutes for some time – that’s quite a high figure in absolute terms.
An hour’s drive from Vancouver ends up in Abbotsford if traffic is free flowing or south of the US border.
So if the downtown population has exploded by the thousands, and those people walk to work in, say 10-15 minutes, then the assumption is that there must be a good number of new 2 hour commuters in the region to balance out those thousands of new downtown residents who walk to work from Downtown South and from the West End.
The averaging may be masking the increases in the absolute number of commuters who have faced longer commutes.
That figure also seems high because there is a lot of cross-suburb commuting in Metro Vancouver, compared to say, Calgary, where the commuting pattern is, as I understand it, purely radial, as it is only one city with one primary business district. In theory, cross-suburb commuting should involve shorter commuting distances than travelling to a downtown core.
With regard to Ron C.’s comment I agree that the averaging could mask changes for specific commuters, or groups of commuters. That said, it is important to recognize that this averaging is at work in every city on the list. Toronto, for example is also building thousands of condos downtown, which is also resulting in thousands of short distance commuters. The difference is that in Toronto the suburbs are growing much faster than the downtown and the average commute times are continuing to inch up despite there massive freeway network.
Well, this is an interesting statistic which should provoke some good debate.
Here’s my one concern with it. According to StatsCan, for their 2005 study of Canadian cities, “car drivers actually spend less time getting to work than transit users… Only 13% of bus or subway riders could make the round-trip commute in under an hour, compared to 55% of car drivers…The average time for public transit users was 106 minutes compared to 59 minutes for those traveling by car.”
From my personal experiences both as a public transit user and driver in the Lower Mainland, this seems about right. And unfortunately, it speaks to the inefficiencies with the transit systems in this country — because I believe transit users have a huge leg-up in the metros of Europe and Japan.
I think we have to remember as well that not every commute is alike. I commuted roughly an hour in Japan, (passing through two cities) for about six months. Although it was bearable at the time, the only reason I chose not to move closer to work was that it was only a temporary contract and I knew it would not last long. Despite the pleasant walking environment to/from the station and absolutely lovely trains, I felt that an hour was simply too long, so I would support the 40-minute theory, personally at least. That said, many have no choice, and there are many people commuting for an hour or two in Japan – however rather than sit in their car in stop-and-go traffic for that time, they’re either walking/biking to the station or riding the (admittedly crowded) train and reading a paper. Point is, the Japanese may be able to tolerate the longer commute times better thanks to a less frustrating commute. (i.e., they’re actually moving and can enjoy other pursuits at the same time)
Greg H –> Blogs are no place for scientific analysis. In fact, if Mr. Price starts posting commuting research on here, I’m gone! Blogs are for gut feelings and opinions, so cool it with the rhetoric, will you?
Good point, Corey.
A one-hour commute by transit can be quite tolerable, IF you have a seat and can enjoy your ipod/nintendo/novel etc. Much preferable to navigating congested highways and fending off road rage at every corner.
In Japan, people will text message, listen to music, watch video and play video games via their cellphones. And more people are doing the same here in Vancouver.
Unfortunately, the situation is entirely different if you’re standing up — whether on a crowded Tokyo subway or one of our over-subscribed Translink buses.
If I were placing bets, and based on anecdotal evidence only, I would say that WestCoast Express and Seabus users are the happiest lot of commuters; Skytrain riders and single-occupant-vehicle drivers are somewhere in the middle; and buses would be last.
Actually, the happiest commuters are cyclists, and then walkers a close second.
A good Vancouver limousine service will help you do just that: by providing the best transportation available to you, you can make sure that such life-changing events will be made as memorable as possible.