Transit times to the office getting worse, census finds
Average commutes have grown longer, data shows, despite shorter distances between work and home for GTA residents
It’s not your imagination: commute times in the Greater Toronto Area are getting worse.
According to 2016 long-form census data released Wednesday by Statistics Canada, it took GTA residents an average of one minute 12 seconds longer to get to work last year than it did in 2011.
Over that time, residents saw their average one-way commute time increase by about 3.7 per cent, from 32 minutes and 36 seconds to 33 minutes and 48 seconds.
City of Toronto residents saw a smaller increase than their neighbours in the rest of the GTA, with their trips increasing by about 42 seconds, from 33 minutes and 30 seconds to 34 minutes and 12 seconds.
It is taking the region’s commuters more time to get to work despite the fact that the average distance between their homes and places of business actually decreased slightly from 2006, falling from 14.8 kilometres to 14.6 kilometres.
GTA residents take longer to get to work than the national average, which was 26 minutes and 12 seconds last year.
The figures capture all commuters, regardless of what mode of transportation they use to get to work.
Despite the longer commute times, Jason Gilmore, chief of labour statistics at Statistics Canada, said there has been a small shift toward more people living closer to where they work. He said since 2011, there has been a 0.5-percentage-point rise in GTA commutes shorter than three kilometres.
“In other words, some people might be shifting the relationship of where they live and where they work to shorten that distance,” he said.
Gilmore said it’s unclear whether some people are moving closer to where they work, or taking jobs closer to their homes.
“The more dense your environment becomes, the more challenging it is to get around. So . . . it’s possible some people are deciding rather than driving through an increasingly dense environment, they’re deciding to choose public transit,” he said in an interview Wednesday.
“It could also be environmental decision-making. People might choose to (take transit) to have less of an impact on the environment.”
There are signs the shift toward transit may not continue far into the future, however. Like many public transit agencies across the continent, the TTC’s ridership growth has begun to falter in recent years and the number of annual trips is holding steady at about 540 million. In 2017, for the first time in more than a decade, ridership figures actually may be lower than the year before. It’s difficult to determine how overall ridership is tied to commuting patterns however, as the TTC ridership figures capture trips for all purposes, not just those for work.
In February, the transit agency is expected to release a strategy to kickstart ridership growth, although no funding for it is included in the 2018 budget the TTC board approved on Tuesday.
A number of new transit projects are about to come online and could allow ridership to grow. An extension of Line 1 (Yonge-University-Spadina) will enter service next month, while the Eglinton Crosstown LRT is scheduled to open by 2021, followed closely by the Finch West LRT.
At the regional level Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency for the GTA, is hoping to get more suburban commuters out of their cars and onto transit with a major expansion of GO Transit service that will see the number of weekly train trips quadruple to 6,000 from 1,500 by 2025.
Despite the decrease in the portion of people using their car to get to work, driving remains the dominant mode of commuting in both Toronto and the wider GTA. In Toronto, 41 per cent of workers drive their car to work without any passengers, while 37 per cent use public transit. Solo driving is even more popular in the wider GTA, with 57.8 per cent of commuters taking their car to work alone and fewer than one in four riding transit.
The census data also showed that it is taking the region’s commuters more time to get to work despite the fact that the average distance between their home and place of business decreased slightly between 2006 and 2016, falling from 14.8 kilometres to 14.6 kilometres.
According to the data, it took GTA residents an average of one minute and 12 seconds longer to get to work last year than it did in 2011. Over that time, the region’s residents saw their average one-way commute time increase by about 3.7 per cent, from 32 minutes and 36 seconds to 33 minutes and 48 seconds.
City residents saw a smaller increase than their neighbours in the rest of the GTA, with their trips increasing by about 42 seconds, from 33 minutes and 30 seconds to 34 minutes and 12 seconds.
The decrease in private car use was not evenly distributed across 25 census districts that make up the GTA. Twelve districts recorded an increase in the portion of commuters who drive. Brock, in the northeast corner of the GTA where residents have little access to public transit, led the way with an 8.3-per-cent spike in driving’s mode share.
Although the portion of commuters who drive has declined, the population increase in the region has meant that there are more cars on the road now than there were 10 years ago. The GTA added 177,740 commuters who drive, but just 8,375 of them came from Toronto, which is by far the largest municipality in the region. Brampton was responsible for the most new drivers, adding 47,095 over the past decade, or more than a quarter of the total increase.
In total, the region added 132,595 transit users over the same period.
In addition to public transit use, active transportation is also on the rise in Toronto, with more than one in 10 reporting they get to work under their own power — 8.6 per cent by walking and 2.7 per cent by cycling. Both modes saw in increase compared to 2006, when 7.1 per cent of commuters reported walking and 1.7 per cent said they cycled.
Among the three largest cities in Canada, Toronto’s census metropolitan area (CMA) had the highest portion of people commuting by “sustainable transportation,” which Statistics Canada defined as public transit, cycling, walking or carpooling.
In 2016, 42.5 per cent of commuters in Toronto’s CMA took sustainable transportation to work, compared to 40.6 per cent in the Vancouver area and 38.1 per cent in Montreal.
“Vancouver has definitely been catching up,” Gilmore said, “and part of that is because they’ve had really some major expansions of public transit in the past 15 years with their SkyTrain.”
The shift away from private vehicle commuting in the Toronto area mirrors a change taking place at the national level over the past 20 years. According to Statistics Canada, since 1996, the portion of Canadians driving to work decreased from 80.7 per cent in 1996 to 79.5 per cent last year.