For the past 15 years, Cathy Johnson has been spending as much time traveling to and from work every weekday as she has sleeping. Every morning she drags herself out of bed in her Wasaga Beach, Ont., home at 4:30 a.m. She leaves her home at 5:45, drives to the Bradford train station, catches the 7 o'clock train, arrives at Toronto's Union Station at 8:15, takes the subway to Toronto General Hospital, and walks through the door of her office by 8:30 a.m. She works a full, exhausting day in the nursing informatics department, then does the almost three-hour trip all over again in reverse.
More at Canadian Business Online:
(Opens new window)
All told, Johnson spends more than 25 hours a week commuting — more than one full day out of every seven. It sounds crazy, but according to Statistics Canada, many of us are spending more time getting to and from work. In Toronto and Vancouver regular commuters now spend an average of 70 minutes on the road each work day, and Montreal is closing in fast with an average commuting time of 60 minutes.
Every sleepy road warrior has his or her own reasons for an extreme commute. For Johnson it's a matter of lifestyle — the idyllic natural setting of her Wasaga Beach home is as important to her as her stimulating job downtown. For many others, it comes down to a simple choice: cram your spouse, two kids and the dog into a cramped condo downtown, or spend the same amount of money on a spacious three-bedroom bungalow with a rolling lawn in the suburbs.
To home hunters, commuting can look like a real money saver. Consider the 55,000 people who make the 75-km daily commute from Hamilton, Ont., to Toronto. Many of them do so because an average resale house goes for only $224,000 in the Hamilton area, compared to a hefty $330,000 in Toronto.
Surprisingly, though, those savings may be an illusion. Tote up costs for gas, insurance and car maintenance and the Canadian Automobile Association calculates that a husband and wife who each make the Hamilton-Toronto commute in separate Chevy Cavaliers will spend close to $144,000 over five years on getting to work. In other words, after five years, your average commuting couple from Hamilton is paying extra to crawl along the highway for two hours every morning.
Then, as Lee Oliver found out, there's the impact commuting has on your quality of life. Two years ago, his typical morning involved getting up at 5:30 a.m., fighting with his wife for the shower, eating burnt toast in the car, missing the 7:04 train, then enduring "two hours of traffic hell" to get from his home in Hamilton to his office job in Toronto. He usually arrived at work late, "and by 10 a.m. I'd feel like I'd gone through half the day." One morning as he was being jostled about on the commuter train, he says, "I saw a woman take a rolled up pancake out of her purse and start eating it. I thought, this is the beginning of the end." Soon after, he quit his job.
Oliver's solution may seem drastic, but he's much happier — and healthier — since taking on a part-time job in Hamilton. In fact, he may have saved his own life. A recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that nearly one out of every 12 heart attacks is linked to being stuck in traffic, and that you nearly triple your risk of having an attack when you get in a car. Commuting is also associated with hostility, high blood pressure and poor cognitive performance. Most revealing of all is a startling finding by Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam. He says that for every 10 minutes of commuting time, the value you get from your social networks is cut by 10%.
Cathy Johnson still insists that her extreme commute is worth it, but she's probably the exception. If the recent condo boom in Toronto and Vancouver is anything to go by, many are finding that compared to the stress and expense of commuting, living downtown isn't so bad after all.
