New Brunswick boasts some of the lowest commute times in country
Moncton residents spend only half the time getting to work as Toronto residents do, Statistics Canada says
New Brunswick's largest cities boast some of the lowest commute times in the country, according to the latest census data released by Statistics Canada.
Taking all modes of transportation into account, it took Moncton residents an average of 17 minutes to get to work on a daily basis in 2016, while Saint John residents needed an average of 20 minutes to get to work.
In big cities like Toronto and Montreal, commuters needed an average of 34 and 30 minutes to get to work, respectively.
Commutes in New Brunswick cities were also shorter than their Maritime counterparts. On average, Halifax residents had a 24-minute commute, while St. John's commuters had an average commute time of 19.3 minutes.
Moncton and Saint John were beat by only a handful of other small cities, including Lethbridge, Alta., which had the lowest average commute time in the country, at 16.8 minutes.
The population of Lethbridge was 92,729 in 2016.
New Brunswick cities had lower proportions of people taking public transit as well.
In Moncton, only 3.4 per cent of those surveyed, and in Saint John, only 4.1 per cent said they took public transit to work on a daily basis. That's still higher than St. John's, where only 3.1 per cent of those surveyed said they took public transit to work.
In Halifax, 11.8 per cent of commuters took public transit to work.
By contrast, in larger cities, 24.3 per cent of Toronto commuters took public transit work, 18.3 per cent of those surveyed in Ottawa/Gatineau said they took public transit to work, and 14.4 per cent of commuters in Calgary took public transit to work.
The agency didn't survey commuters in New Brunswick's third-largest city, Fredericton.