Getting to work is taking longer than ever

Time spent commuting to and from work has risen to a record high | How does your city rate?

Diana Nyari commutes from Ipswich to Brisbane and back every day for work. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Time spent commuting to and from work has risen to a record high as increases in the regions and Brisbane more than make up for shorter commutes in the ­nation’s two biggest cities.

Workers on average spent 4.5 hours a week commuting in 2017, according to the results of the Melbourne Institute’s latest annual household survey, an increase of 23 per cent compared with 2002 and 2.3 per cent up on 2014.

While Sydneysiders averaged 71 minutes a day of commuting — the longest of any major city — for the first time workers in Brisbane rather than Melbourne endured the second longest average daily commute — 67 minutes compared with 65 minutes.

“Population growth is definitely part of the story, but there doesn’t seem to be a close link ­between which city grew fastest and which city had the fastest growing commutes,’’ said Inga Lass, who analysed the survey data.

 

“There’s a lot of other stuff going on.’’

Geography played a big part in cities’ different commute times, said Daniel Veryard, a transport economist at Veicht Lister Consulting.

“Sydney and Brisbane both have major water barriers and, in Sydney’s case in particular, hilly terrain, making transport networks more costly to build and often less comprehensive,” he said.

Dr Lass said research suggested workers tended to look around for other jobs once commutes reached an hour a day.

“Lengthy commutes have repeatedly been shown to be associated with reduced worker wellbeing and negative family outcomes,” the report, funded by the federal government, said.

“Long distance commuters are more likely to have looked for a new job at some time in the last four weeks.’’

Average commute times have fallen slightly in Sydney and Melbourne since 2014, although each was 17 per cent and 12 per cent higher than in 2002, respectively.

“I could imagine in the capitals we have reached a plateau in the sense of a lot of people have a maximum amount of time they are willing to spend on commuting,” Dr Lass said.

Increases in commute times by the majority of workers, who have relatively short commutes, underpinned the overall rise.

“Commuting times have not changed at the top: in all the years, the person at the 90th percentile of the commuting time distribution spent two hours per day travelling to and from work,” the report said.

Workers in the five biggest state capitals spent 66 minutes a day on average commuting, compared with 48 minutes for those living in the regions.

However, commute times hadn’t increased much over the five years to 2016, according to separate Grattan Institute analysis released last year.

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