[URBAN NOTE] Four notes on the Torontonian commute

[rfmcdonald]

A new report from Statistics Canada--"Commuting to work: Results of the 2010 General Social Survey", by Martin Turcotte--created a fair amount of press reaction.

The first striking element of this reaction relate to the proportion of commuters who drove.

The Statistics Canada study found about 82 per cent of commuters travelled to work by car in 2010, while 12 per cent took public transit and six per cent walked or cycled.

[. . .]

“Of the 10.6 million workers who commuted by car, about 9 million reported that they had never used public transit for their commute,” says the 2010 General Social Survey.

“About 7.4 million of these people thought public transit would be somewhat or very inconvenient.”

About 1.6 million car commuters, or 15 per cent, said they had tried using public transit to get to work; 53 per cent of them considered it inconvenient.

The second striking element?

“Commuters who used public transit took considerably longer to get to work than those who lived an equivalent distance from their place of work and went by car,” says the study.

Nationally, users of public transit spent 44 minutes travelling to work, compared with 24 minutes for those who went by car.

Commuting times are door-to-door, StatsCan notes. Times for public transit are generally longer because its use can involve walking to a transit stop and waiting for a bus, it says.

In the six largest cities, the average commuting time was 44 minutes for public transit users and 27 minutes by car. The gap in average commuting time was slightly larger in mid-sized metropolitan areas — 46 minutes on public transit and 23 minutes by car.

“The gap was not a result of distance travelled,” the agency says.

“Among workers in (cities) with at least 250,000 residents who travelled less than 5 kilometres to work, car users had an average commute of 10 minutes, compared with 26 minutes for public transit users. The same held true for longer commutes.”

In Toronto and Vancouver, it took public transit users about 20 minutes longer than car users to get to work. In Montreal, the difference was much smaller, about 10 minutes.

While satisfaction with commuting times was generally high (85 per cent said they were satisfied or very satisfied), big-city residents were more than twice as likely to be frustrated with their commuting times than those in smaller centres.

“Public transit users were more likely than car commuters to be dissatisfied with their commuting times (23 per cent versus 18 per cent),” says the study.

“This was primarily because it takes them longer on average to get to work.”

This has been noted before as a very serious issue for Toronto.

In late March, the Toronto Board of Trade warned the current gridlock crisis will only worsen, which is hard to fathom since the GTA already ranks dead last in its ranking of 21 North American cities for average commute time. The board used data gathered in the 2006 census.

The board reported the 80-minute roundtrip commute costs the GTA $6 billion a year. The commute time included drivers, transit users, cyclists and walkers. Montreal, and its crumbling roads and bridges, ranked next at 76 minutes. Los Angeles, often assumed to be the epicentre of driving hell, has a more modest commute of 55.9 minutes.

And the board predicts a “carmageddon” in 20 years when another 1 million cars will be on GTA roads, which will raise the average commute to nearly two hours. It doesn’t help that most Torontonians ride to work in four wheels: more than 70 per cent of commuters drove to their job in 2006, the most recent data available.

The board’s analysis revealed 28.8 per cent of Toronto’s commuters walk, bike or take public transit to work, which ranks 11th out of 22 cities worldwide. Montreal was slightly ahead with 29.5 per cent, while Vancouver sits at 25.3 per cent.

New York City is North America’s gold standard with 40.3 per cent avoiding the car on their commute. That’s nothing compared to other cities around the world such as Hong Kong, where nine out of 10 workers walk, bike or use transit.

The board recently suggested examining anything that could curb gridlock, including road tolls, parking levies and tax tools among a litany of other ideas. Otherwise, the board said, Toronto isn’t as attractive to potential workers due to the city’s egregious commuting time.

My contribution to this discussion? A reiteration of the truism that the Toronto city policies traditionally favouring mass transit and biking are popular in the old city, the pre-amalgamation city, where the biking culture exists and there's a suitably compact and bikable geography and topography, but that these policies may not work so well in the rest of the post-amalgamation city of Toronto, in places where mass transit is more sparse and bking much less possible. (Do you want to bike for two hours to get to work?)

One of these maps--5 January 2010's "Map of the Week: Commuter cycling by census tract"--shows which neighbourhoods of Toronto are home to people who commute regularly via bicycle and which are not, and, in so doing, shows why biking isn't big across Toronto and why there are so many disputes within Toronto as to the use of biking. The areas coloured dark blue in the area of the Cain's map of Toronto bike commuting are all but one of the areas where 10-12% of the resident population commutes via bicycle, and are themselves surrounded by most of the other bicycle-happy districts of the city.

Much more investment in mass transit is needed, and yes, encouraging more of a biking culture is a good idea. Convergence of outer Toronto on the biking norms of downtown Toronto remains unrealistic, unless you're going to use singularities to engage in controlled reversable implosions of space or something. Toronto, by virtue of its physical size, is going to be a car city with bike neighbourhoods and a mass transit skeleton. It can't be anything else