Long gone are the empty roads and unfilled train and bus seats of the COVID-19 pandemic days.
More Canadians are commuting to work and the average commuting time has returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to new data released by Statistics Canada Monday.
The number of commuters reached 16.5 million this May, up 585,000 compared to the same time last year, the agency said. The data continues a rising trend over the past few years following major declines in 2020 and 2021 when pandemic restrictions kept many workers at home.
The average Canadian now spends 26.4 minutes travelling to work, just above the previous high of 26.3 minutes in May 2016, according to the data.
Cities in and around the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area are bearing the brunt of the country’s long commutes. Toronto has the highest commuting time of 33.3 minutes, the data shows.
Toronto commuter Jonievy Luther Cabansag said, if she’s lucky, it takes her an hour-and-a-half to commute from Scarborough to downtown for work.
“That’s why I always budget two hours for travel just to make sure I won’t come to work late,” she said.
She said — 90 per cent of the time — she agrees with the meme that “Toronto is an hour away from Toronto.”
Cities outside Toronto see the longest commutes in the country
After Toronto, topping the list for longest commutes are Oshawa (32.6 minutes), Barrie (30.7 minutes), and Hamilton (30.6 minutes), where workers have longer commutes than people living in Vancouver (30.5 minutes) and Montreal (29 minutes).
Steve Farber, a transportation expert and professor at the University of Toronto, said he’s not surprised by the longer commute times seen in cities around Toronto.
“A pretty large share of commuters living in Hamilton or Oshawa are actually coming to work either in downtown Toronto or elsewhere in the GTA,” he said.
Samantha Pereira from Mississauga said it takes her 35 minutes “on a good day” to get to school in Hamilton.
“There’s just so many times where I’m just standing there and then the bus just vanishes from the app and just doesn’t exist anymore,” she said. “I’ll just be at the stop and I’m like, where [is] my bus?”
One fifth of Oshawa commuters spend an hour or more getting to work, the highest share among all cities. Toronto (15.7%) has the second largest share of workers with such a long commute, followed by Barrie (14.6 per cent).
‘A huge waste of time,’ commuter says
Bilal Malik is one of those commuters with a long journey to work. The software engineer said it takes him an hour to get from Oshawa to his job in Toronto.
“It’s a huge waste of time,” he said while standing at Toronto’s Union Station Tuesday. He said that day he had missed his GO train stop coming from Oshawa and had to commute for an extra hour.
Like many employees in the post-pandemic world, Malik now has to be in the office at least two days a week. The Statistics Canada data shows that hybrid workers like him take 14.4 minutes longer on average to get to work than the average commuter.
Malik said he moved to Oshawa because he didn’t want to deal with the high living costs in Toronto while working mostly from home. He said he believes that’s the case with many hybrid workers, who moved to more affordable locations and now have to commute for longer after returning to the office.
Congestion, reduced transit service lengthen commute times: expert
Statistics Canada said the increase in the number of commuters is being driven by employment growth and more people working outside the home.
Of those commuters, 81.5 per cent of commuters mainly drive while 11.4 per cent use public transit, according to the data.
Farber says traffic congestion and reduced transit service are two factors that have driven up commute times.
“Reduced revenues lead to reduced services. And of course, ridership goes down when there’s fewer services and we enter this downward spiral,” Farber said.
Urban transit ridership in May 2024 was at 87 per cent compared to May 2019 — its highest level since the onset of the pandemic — but still hasn’t fully recovered, Statistics Canada said.
Public transit aside, traffic in Toronto has gotten so bad that last year, it was ranked the third worst in the world.
Farber said carpooling is a good solution to road congestion. The new data shows that, nationally, 89.5 per cent of commuters who drive to work do so alone.
“We are entering a permanent new stage for the city where driving through downtown is going to be slower and worse than taking transit,” he said.
Commuters who spoke with CBC said other factors affect their commute times, including construction and transit closures.
Shelagh Pizey-Allen, director of advocacy group TTC Riders, said Toronto’s commute woes also stem from buses getting caught in the traffic, along with newly-installed slow zones on subway lines in areas in need of track repair.
“Minutes are being added in each direction every day and there’s no clear end date,” she said.
Pizey-Allen said the new improvements to TTC service announced this week are great news, but the system continues to suffer from a lack of funding for service and repairs.
“Whether people are really going to feel the difference of these investments is another question,” she said.