B.C. ditches the car, takes the train
More of us commute by transit; many others walk, bike, census shows
Every weekday, Geoff Flamank’s alarm clock goes off at 8:30 a.m.
He gets ready for work and then walks two blocks from his Tsawwassen home to the bus stop, where he catches an express bus to Bridgeport station. From there, he hops on the Canada Line to Broadway-City Hall station in Vancouver, then walks four blocks to his office.
From door to door, his commute takes just under an hour.
“It’s wonderful, actually,” Flamank said. “I get to roll past everybody that’s in cars. I can sit and I can write. I have a nice, comfortable seat. It’s warm, I can listen to music or I can read, and it’s predictable and it’s affordable.”
Flamank is one of a growing number of people in the Metro Vancouver region who are turning to transit for their daily commute.
Some of the latest data released from the 2016 census looks at a number of aspects of Canadians’ journeys to work, including how many people commute, how they get to work, how long it takes them to get there and how far they travel.
Across the country, 15.9 million people commuted to work in 2016. That is up from five years ago, when the national household survey showed about 15.4 million Canadians commuted to work.
B.C. had the three census metropolitan areas with the highest percentages of people who work from home — Kelowna (9.3 per cent), Victoria (8.4) and Vancouver (8.2). The proportion of Canadians working from home is 7.4 per cent, a number that has been declining.
The three cities also had some of the highest proportions of people working in professional, scientific and technical services, such as engineers, accountants and consultants.
People in B.C. were also more likely to have no fixed workplace (14.1 per cent), which includes people working in construction, truck drivers or temp agency employees.
Seventy-four per cent of Canadians who commuted to fixed workplaces drove, 12 per cent took transit, seven per cent walked or rode a bicycle, six per cent were passengers in a car, and one per cent used another method.
In the Vancouver census metropolitan area, which encompasses Metro Vancouver, 69 per cent of people go to work in personal vehicles.
Between 1996 and 2016, the number of people in Metro Vancouver using cars to commute decreased 7.9 per cent, which is more than the national average.
During that same 20-year period, the proportion of commuters using transit in Metro Vancouver went up six percentage points, the largest increase of any census metropolitan area in Canada.
Just over 20 per cent of commuters in the region used transit in 2016.
“It’s part of a generational shift not only in attitudes, but in infrastructure investment, and I think it’s really talking about the success of planning, to a certain degree, of the region to the extent that we decided to have a series of nodes supported by a transit system,” said Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program.
Statistics Canada said improvements to transit service since 2002 — the opening of the Millennium and Canada lines and a major bus fleet increase between 2005 and 2009 — could explain part of the bump in the proportion of public transit commuters in Vancouver between 1996 and 2016.
TransLink spokesman Chris Bryan said the increase is a sign regional plans to ensure growth around transit corridors are working.
“It makes for a much more efficient system. It makes transit an easy choice for people,” he said.
He said there have been major infrastructure investments over the past 20 years, but in terms of service improvements there was a boost leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics and little since until last year, when the first phase of a 10-year plan for the region was approved.
“Now we’re in a great position in that we can start to provide the service the region needs to meet that pent-up demand,” Bryan said.
Cities that are better served by transit tend to have a higher percentage of transit users.
For example, 30 per cent of Vancouver commuters use transit, as do 29 per cent of Burnaby commuters, 19 per cent of Richmond commuters and 18 per cent of Coquitlam commuters. Surrey, a large city with four SkyTrain stations that is serviced mostly by buses, has 15 per cent of commuters using transit and 81 per cent taking cars.
When it comes to other forms of sustainable transportation, Victoria, which is considered a mid-sized census metropolitan area, has the highest percentage of people who walk to work (10.3 per cent) and cycle (6.6 per cent).
Vancouver ranks fifth nationally in terms of walkers, with 6.7 per cent, and fourth in cycling commuters, with 2.3 per cent.
Across Canada, the average oneway commute was 26.2 minutes, up slightly from the 2011 commute of 25.4 minutes. The increase can likely be attributed to a longer commute for those who take public transit.
In the Vancouver census metropolitan area, the average commute is 29.7 minutes, a one-minute increase over 2011. The median one-way commuting distance for workers was down slightly, from 7.7 kilometres to 7.4.
The proportion of commuters working in the city of Vancouver edged down 0.1 per cent, while the proportion of commuters working in other nearby communities increased. For instance, 44 per cent of commuters from Surrey work in Surrey and 23.5 per cent commute to Richmond, Burnaby or Delta, while only 12.7 per cent go to Vancouver.
Yan said the key in the future will be making sure people can easily get to neighbouring communities without their cars, not just in and out of Vancouver.
Bryan said increasing B-Line bus service between communities such as Maple Ridge and Coquitlam, or Surrey and Richmond, is part of TransLink’s long-term plans.
The census results come as TransLink is asking 400,000 Lower Mainland households to fill out a regional trip diary, which it says will help the transit authority and other regional partners to plan transit service and improvements to road, cycling and walking infrastructure.