It’s not your imagination, Torontonians — according to newly released transit data, Toronto public transit users may have one of the longest commutes in North America.
Moovit, a public transit app run by Mobileye, aggregated data using millions of trips conducted through their app in 2022 to create a report on transit trends.
The report includes 99 cities across 24 countries, including Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. City data includes metro areas immediately surrounding those cities.
The report looked at issues such as the duration of a single commute, how much distance was travelled on average in commutes, wait times and the impact of COVID-19 on these trips.
The average commute using public transit in Toronto is 56 minutes, according to the data, coming in just under Chicago and Washington at 57 minutes and New York City at 58 minutes for the longest commutes in North America.
However, Canadians seem to enjoy shorter wait times than some of the other regions included in the data.
The top three shortest wait times all belonged to Canadian cities, with Montreal boasting 10 minutes, Vancouver coming in at 11 minutes, and Toronto having an average of 12 minutes per wait.
In comparison, the top three longest wait times per commute were Los Angeles at 18 minutes, Chicago at 19 minutes and Miami at 21 minutes.
In terms of sheer distance travelled, Torontonians are trekking the farthest distance in North America with their average commute, according to the report, with an average of 12.29 kilometres covered one way per trip. This puts Toronto seventh on the list of cities or countries in terms of kilometres travelled one way during the average commute. Israel had the highest trip distance, at 19.21 km travelled per trip.
There is also a higher percentage of Canadians living in Toronto who experience a commute of two hours or longer. Just under seven per cent of those in Toronto are travelling more than two hours one way for their commute, compared to 4.2 per cent of those in Greater Vancouver and 3.2 per cent of those in Montreal.
This was classified in the report as a long commute, compared to a medium commute (1-2 hours) or a short commute, which was one shorter than 30 minutes.
For all three cities, the percentage of residents enjoying a short commute was higher than the percentage who had either a medium or long commute. Vancouver came out on top in this category, with nearly 40 per cent of residents having a short commute.
However, a bigger percentage of Canadians in these cities had short commutes in 2020 compared to 2022. In Montreal, 32.6 per cent had a short commute in 2020, compared to 24 per cent in 2022, according to the data.
According to the data, commute lengths have increased since 2020 in Canada, with the commute increasing by around four to five minutes between 2020 and 2022 in the three Canadian cities included.
Although Toronto has the shortest average wait time, a much larger percentage of those in Montreal had to wait less than five minutes for their commute in the last year, with 36 per cent of those in Montreal enjoying this short wait time compared to 22 per cent of Torontonians and 25 per cent of those in Vancouver.
Toronto also had the highest percentage of residents who experienced an average wait time longer than 20 minutes in 2022, at 15 per cent, compared to 11 per cent in Montreal and nine per cent in Vancouver.
Montreal scored highest among Canadians cities when it came to the percentage of residents who had two or three transfers per commute. More than half of those in Montreal had two transfers, while around 21 per cent had three or more transfers, according to the data. Of the three cities, Toronto had the highest percentage of residents whose average commute consisted of a single line with no transfers at 29 per cent compared to Vancouver’s 25 per cent and Montreal’s 24 per cent.
The report also included results from a survey that asked commuters what would entice them to use transit more.
In Montreal, the most popular answer was shorter trip duration with less congestion and cheaper fares, at 24 and 25 per cent, respectively.
Cheaper fares was the most common answer for Toronto and Vancouver as well, with 25 per cent of Torontonians and 27 per cent of those in Vancouver selecting this option.
Although there were marked differences between the length of some commutes, wait times and other metrics between 2020 and 2022, when asked how COVID-19 had changed their usage of public transit, most Canadians in Vancouver and Toronto stated that it had not affected the frequency of their transit usage.
Around a third of those in Montreal said they now use public transit less frequently, and around 25 per cent of Canadians across all three cities said they used it less.
