Yazmin Cueva’s alarm sounds at 5am.<\/p>\n
She needs those three and a half hours to make the journey from her home to work.<\/p>\n
She could linger in bed a bit longer when she worked in Sydney’s central business district, catching one train from her St Helen’s Park home \u2014 a one-hour commute.<\/p>\n
Now, it is multiple trains and a mad rush to her office in Parramatta.<\/p>\n
“It’s stressful \u2026 I’m a mother as well, so I have to do all the things beforehand for the kids,” Ms Cueva told the ABC.<\/p>\n
“I’ve had to learn to just get to the station early and be able to get whatever train is earliest.”<\/p>\n
She said she arrived early because the trains might not “always be running on time”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yazmin Cueva said waking up about three hours before work starts to get into the office on time can be stressful. (ABC News Graphics: Lindsay Dunbar)<\/p>\n
Ms Cueva’s commute generally takes about an hour and a half one-way.<\/p>\n
This significantly exceeds the average, according to the latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey by the University of Melbourne and the Melbourne Institute.<\/p>\n
It found that most Australians’ time travelling to work was decreasing since the coronavirus pandemic, with the average daily commute taking under an hour, or slightly less than 30 minutes one-way.<\/p>\n
The study analysed the factors contributing to commute times, highlighting flexible work.<\/p>\n
“The increase in working from home arrangements is one thing that has helped get commuting times significantly down,” Dr Inga Lass said, a senior research fellow on the HILDA Survey.<\/p>\n
Bigger cities, longer commutes<\/p>\n
The biggest cities often have longer work commutes, according to professor of transport David Levinson from the University of Sydney.<\/p>\n
The cities with the longest commutes in Australia were three of its most populous cities: Sydney (59 minutes), Brisbane (56 minutes) and Melbourne (55 minutes).<\/p>\n
The shortest commute in Europe was in Iceland, one of the smallest countries on the continent, where workers on average got to the office within 15 minutes.<\/p>\n
While in Canada, the place with the longest commute was Toronto, which also has the largest population of any city in the country.<\/p>\n
There were a few reasons larger cities often led to longer commutes, Professor Levinson said.<\/p>\n
He pointed to congestion leading to crowding on existing roads as cities were denser than less urbanised areas.<\/p>\n
But Professor Levinson does not think commute times can get any shorter than about 30 minutes one way, saying “you can’t actually fix commuting times” beyond that.<\/p>\n
‘Super commuters’ share their experiences<\/a><\/p>\n Economists estimate there are up to 400,000 “super commuters” in Australia travelling extreme distances, including overseas, for dream jobs or high-paying work in locations like Alaska and Antarctica.<\/p>\n One of his initial research projects<\/a> focused on commuting data in Washington, DC, across three years in separate decades in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s.<\/p>\n It found commuting times were about 30 minutes across the decades despite several changes to the US capital.<\/p>\n Professor Levinson said people were making choices between commuting times and more affordable housing options in the outer suburbs.<\/p>\n “You could live in more housing, bigger house, but have a longer commute because that’s what you can afford,” he said.<\/p>\n Sydney, Melbourne in top 70 cities for urban mobility<\/p>\n A 30-minute, or even an hour, commute seemed impossible for workers such as Ms Cueva, who lived in Australia’s outer suburbs.<\/p>\n The Climate Council found people who live in the biggest growth areas<\/a> across Australia’s middle and outer suburbs were under-served by public transport.<\/p>\n “It takes a lot longer for outer Sydney areas to have accessible transport,” she said. Some experts have said automation could be a solution in speeding up wait times at train stations. (ABC News: Harriet Tatham)<\/p>\n The Urban Mobility Readiness Index analyses transportation in 70 cities around the world and ranks the cities in three categories \u2014 leading, developing and lagging.<\/p>\n The top-three cities in the leading category were San Francisco, Paris and Singapore.<\/p>\n Sydney and Melbourne were ranked as developing, in 29th and 33rd position respectively.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n