A comprehensive survey shows that Hamiltonians are increasingly forced to head outside the city to find jobs. Twenty years ago a quarter of the workforce was out-commuters, whereas now it is approaching four employees in ten.
That extra driving is reflected in multiple other effects – from very poor local growth in jobs, to increased highway congestion, to stagnant HSR ridership, to more stress on families and community participation.
The Transportation Tomorrow Survey is conducted every five years and covers twenty major municipalities in and around Toronto from Peterborough to Niagara Falls and north to Waterloo, Barrie and Orillia. In 2016 it collected trip information from over 160,000 households and its findings inform road, transit and other aspects of transportation planning.
The 2016 results released last month report a daily average of 193,900 work trips are made by Hamiltonians of which over 70,000 were to locations outside the city. That means nearly 37 percent of employed residents have jobs in some other municipality instead of their home city.
The trend for Hamilton to become a bedroom community has been going on for decades. Twenty years ago is was just 25 percent and two decades before that far more workers were coming into Hamilton to work than were leaving for some other place.
The numbers also underline the failure of the economic system to generate new jobs inside the city. Between 1996 and 2016, the number of out-commuters grew by over 31,000. In the same period the number of work trips by Hamiltonians to jobs inside the city went up by just 3700.
That means barely ten percent of job growth for Hamiltonians since1996 has occurred inside the city’s boundaries and nearly 90 percent of new jobs have required getting to some other municipality. Fortunately, that seems to be changing.
The fact that between 2001 and 2006, local job trips actually fell by over 9000 makes the picture look bleaker than recent trends. In the last five years local job trips have climbed by ten thousand, just slightly less than the 11,000 increase in out-commuting.
But having well over a third of your employed residents commuting long distances every day certainly creates problems for a city. For example, many of those seventy thousand people travelling to work outside Hamilton are making congestion on the 403 and QEW much worse.
That’s one of the reasons that the (now previous) provincial government offered Hamilton over a billion dollars for new GO services and an LRT that would feed commuters into inter-city transit options. Hamiltonian commuters are a big and growing part of the congestion problem in and around Toronto that Queen’s Park is tasked with solving.
The stagnant growth in local jobs and the growing numbers working outside the city are probably a key reason why HSR ridership has failed to grow despite population increases. It’s also certainly affecting the vibrancy of local communities when many of its residents are spending long hours on increasingly congested roads.
Participation in neighbourhood affairs, community meetings or local political life are all restricted by time spent outside the city. Almost certainly those commuters are more likely to be shopping outside the city and consequently buying less from local businesses – at least partly because travelling costs are a big drain on resident finances.
The increased driving – and over four-fifths of Hamiltonians trips are as drivers or passengers in a vehicle – imposes higher air pollution levels and greater climate-disturbing greenhouse gas emissions.