Your commute may not only be eating into your mornings and evenings — it may be shaving years off your lifespan.
For one thing, studies have shown that pollution from the traffic commuters often sit in can be detrimental to human health, even for those inside cars and buses. It can raise the risk of early death by heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. It can be especially dangerous for young children; a study from researchers at U of T showed the DNA of umbilical cords in newborns had been altered after being exposed to traffic pollution.
There are also studies suggesting there’s a correlation between commute times behind the wheel and obesity, and all the negative health effects that can cause.
And even if your commute isn’t taking its toll on your physical well-being, it’s almost surely affecting you mentally, with countless studies showing that commuting tops the list of workplace stressors.
The ‘daily hassle’ can change your life
It is, scientifically, a “daily hassle,” said Marisa Young, a sociology professor at McMaster, “something you have to constantly endure, without any real solution to help alleviate the stress it creates.”
Although Young’s research has shown that commutes of less than 30 minutes can be healthy as a sort of transition period from work mode to home mode, longer ones or ones full of frustration that eat into time with family and friends can worsen your mood and have harmful health effects.
A 2023 study found that Korean commuters with trips of an hour or more were 16 per cent more likely to experience depressive symptoms. Another 2014 study from researchers at the University of Waterloo linked longer car commutes to lower life satisfaction and heightened feeling of time pressure.
Toronto commuters have it worse
None of this comes as news to Torontonians, who endure the longest daily grind of all Canadians, according to Statistics Canada, with an average of 34.9 minutes spent getting to and from work, with nearly a quarter of those trips made using public transit.
That time spent going back and forth between work and home each workday is connected to one of Toronto’s other notable features — the high cost of housing. As an affordable place to live has become harder to attain, more people are moving farther outside of the city, said Jesse Rosenberg, the director of policy at the health equity research non-profit the Wellesley Institute.
“Social connection matters for health. People want to be with the people they love, they want to be with people that they want to spend time enjoying life with,” Rosenberg said.
“And when you’re pushed out into the middle of nowhere and when we don’t have the public transportation network that would enable you to do that … that matters for mental health. That matters for physical health.”
And it seems like it’s only getting worse — that 34.9 minutes is a 3.4-minute jump from the previous year. It may not sound like much, but with more Canadians going back to the office post-pandemic it’s meant more commuters spending more of their precious time on trains, buses, cars and bikes.
Daily grind slows to a crawl
As more people return to the office after years of being able to work from home and widespread construction from condos and transit projects close lanes, more stress has been put on our transit system and roads.
For drivers, traffic has gotten so bad in Toronto that city hall is hiring a congestion czar in the hopes they can get the streets moving again.
If you thought avoiding the clogged streets might speed your way to earn your daily bread — along come persistent slow zones to ensure that subway riders also get to experience that grinding to a halt feeling. That’s when parts of the subway aren’t outright shutdown, as they are on more weekends.
Those transit woes are only the most obvious sign of the funding constraints that the TTC has faced for several years. Its multibillion-dollar state-of-good-repair backlog means that those closures nearly every other weekend, as well as the slow zones and unexpected delays, aren’t expected to get much better without further funding from all levels of government.
And not all commutes are equal, either. For precarious workers, commuting can be even more gruelling and may even prevent a person’s ability to apply for better jobs, a 2016 McMaster study found.
But what isn’t clear in the science and studies is what exactly makes a commute so mentally and physically exhausting.
Is it slow zones or congestion? Unexpected delays? Rude customer service or unruly passengers? Loud music or the screeching wheels of a subway car?
That’s why the Star is testing some of the toughest daily trials the TTC puts Torontonians through each and every workday. Join us in the coming weeks — on the subway, bus and streetcar — as we retrace the steps of everyday riders to find the worst commute in the city and understand what really makes the daily grind in Toronto such a well, grind.
