New study finds Toronto has worst commute in North America

Toronto commute the worst in North America: Study A new study says that Toronto commuters spend 96 minutes a day in a car, leading to the title of worst commute in North America.

Torontonians spend more time commuting on average than residents in every other major city with the exception of Colombia’s traffic-clogged capital of Bogota, a new study has found.

U.K.-based business solution company Expert Market ranked 74 cities with populations of more than 300,000 on their commutes and Toronto ended up grouped among the worst.

The rankings were based on how cities performed in seven key areas, including average time spent commuting; average time spent waiting for a bus or train, average journey distance and percentage of public transit riders who have to transfer at least once during their commute.

Though Toronto was only sixth worst overall, the city was tied for the second longest average commute time of any city (96 minutes, both ways). The only city in which average commute times were longer was Bogota, Colombia (97 minutes, both ways) and even there the difference was negligible.

Toronto also had the worst result in terms of the percentage of transit riders who need to transfer at least once during their commute (73 per cent). That number was well beyond that of other traffic-clogged cities in the bottom five overall like Rio de Janeiro (62 per cent) and Bogota (67 per cent).

Toronto did perform a little better in categories like the average time spent waiting for transit daily (14 minutes) and the cost of monthly transit as a percentage of income (6.5 per cent) but it was not enough to lift the city out of the bottom six.

In a statement provided to CP24 on Thursday, Mayor John Tory’s office said that while there is “still lots to do on traffic and safety,” efforts are already underway to reduce gridlock across Toronto.

"Mayor Tory is focused on building transit and getting our city moving so that Toronto residents - regardless of whether they ride transit, cycle, walk or drive - can have a better commute,” the statement says. “Today, we have a council-approved transit expansion plan – the first of its kind – a plan that will see us move ahead with priority projects like SmartTrack, the Relief Line and the Bloor-Danforth subway extension all at once instead of one-after-the-other, with long pauses in between, like we used to.”

These are the worst 10 cities for commuting, according to Expert Market”

The top cities for commuting are as follows: