Canada's Longest Commutes: Vancouver Is 4th, and Maple Ridge Leaves for Work First

Toronto has the longest commute of any Canadian metro area, which surprises nobody: 29.8 min one way, on average, in the 2021 Census. The surprise is who comes next. Barrie (29.4 min) and Oshawa (29.3 min) beat Metro Vancouver, which lands 4th of Canada's 41 metro areas at 27.3 min, a hair ahead of Montréal (27.0 min). The national average is 23.7 min.

I pulled Statistics Canada's commuting tables for every metro area in the country and for each of Metro Vancouver's 21 municipalities, then sorted them every way I could think of: longest trips, earliest starts, most transit, most walking. Maple Ridge is the region's early-rising capital. The City of North Vancouver has the shortest trip. Victoria out-cycles every other metro area in Canada, and Prince Rupert has the shortest commute in BC: 11.5 min.

Below: a Metro Vancouver commute map, all 41 metro areas ranked, BC from Squamish to Prince Rupert, a calculator for how many hours a year you spend getting to work, a quiz, and what the trade-off looks like if you're deciding where to buy.

The Metro Vancouver commute map

Each shape is a municipality, coloured by how its residents get to work. That's worth stressing: these are trips by the people who live in each place, wherever they work. A Maple Ridge resident who works in Maple Ridge counts the same as one who drives to Richmond. Tap a municipality for the full set of numbers.

All 21 municipalities

Among the 17 municipalities with at least 5,000 commuters, Maple Ridge has the longest average trip (30.2 min), with Surrey and Port Moody tied just behind at 29.7 min. Maple Ridge also tops the hour-plus list: 13.1% of its commuters spend at least 60 minutes getting to work, one way. Surrey and Coquitlam are next, both at 10.9%.

The short end of the table is all North Shore. The City of North Vancouver averages 22.5 min, the District 22.7 min and West Vancouver 23.3 min. Among the 17, the City of North Vancouver also has the highest share of trips under 15 minutes (31%).

Vancouver itself sits in the lower half at 25.3 min, and it's the region's most car-light place by a distance: 56% of its commuters go by car, against 92% in Langley Township. 23% take transit and 18% walk or bike, both the highest in Metro Vancouver. New Westminster (22%) and Burnaby (22%) are close behind on transit.

Then there's Bowen Island, which breaks every pattern. 48% of its 1,270 commuters get to work in under 15 minutes, the highest share in the region, and 24% take an hour or more, also the highest. On an island with a ferry to Horseshoe Bay, you either work on the island or you don't. (The sample is small, so take the exact shares loosely.)

Which Canadian city has the longest commute?

Statistics Canada publishes the same numbers for every census metropolitan area (CMA), the 41 urban regions of 100,000 people or more. Pick a measure:

A few things jump out.

The Toronto orbit is the long-commute capital. Barrie and Oshawa have the 2nd and 3rd longest average commutes and the highest shares of hour-plus trips of any metro area: 16.6% in Barrie and 14.5% in Oshawa, ahead of Toronto itself (11.6%). Metro Vancouver is at 8.2%.

Victoria is the bike and walking capital of Canada's metro areas. 5.3% of Victoria's commuters ride a bike to work, the highest of any metro area, and 10.0% walk, also the highest. It even leads on motorcycles and scooters (0.7%). Metro Vancouver ranks 3rd for cycling at 1.9%.

Transit is a three-city club. Toronto (15.6%), Montréal (15.3%) and Vancouver (14.9%) are the only metro areas where more than one commuter in ten takes transit. Next is Ottawa–Gatineau at 9.7%.

The earliest risers live in Brantford. 31.8% of Brantford's commuters leave between 5 and 6:59 a.m., the highest share of any metro area. St. John's sleeps in: just 14.2% leave that early. The shortest metro-area commute belongs to Moncton (16.6 min).

BC, from Squamish to Prince Rupert

Add BC's 21 census agglomerations (urban areas of 10,000 people or more) to its 7 metro areas and you get a commute ranking for the whole province. BC overall averages 24.0 min, a bit above Canada's 23.7 min.

Metro Vancouver has the longest commute in BC, followed by Abbotsford–Mission (25.2 min) and Squamish (24.9 min). Squamish has the province's highest share of hour-plus commutes, 13.4%, edging out Abbotsford–Mission (10.5%). That fits a town up the Sea-to-Sky Highway from Vancouver, where some residents commute down to the city. Squamish also has a lot of cyclists: 4.3% bike to work, second in BC only to Victoria.

At the short end, Prince Rupert (11.5 min) and Powell River (14.4 min) have the shortest commutes in BC. Prince Rupert's is also shorter than any of Canada's 41 metro areas (the shortest of those is Moncton, 16.6 min). Nelson is BC's walking town: 16.2% of its commuters walk to work, the highest in BC and behind only Yellowknife (17.6%) among all the places in this post. Prince Rupert (10.4%), Penticton (10.2%) and Victoria (10.0%) are the only other BC places at 10% or more.

Kelowna, Kamloops and Nanaimo all come in around 19 minutes (19.5 min, 19.0 min and 19.5 min), about eight minutes shorter than Metro Vancouver each way.

Car, bus, SkyTrain, feet: how long each one takes

In Metro Vancouver, the average transit commute takes 42.6 min one way, against 25.6 min for the car: about 17 minutes longer, every trip. That's the national pattern too (Canada: 42.9 min by transit, 22.8 min by car). My guess is that it's partly distance (transit trips into downtown or across the region are long ones) and partly the walk to the stop, the wait and the transfer.

SkyTrain trips average 44.7 min and the West Coast Express 46.7 min, both longer than the bus (41.3 min), which suggests rail is doing the long hauls. Walkers have it easiest at 14.7 min. My read: if you want a short commute in this region, the cheapest way to get one is to live where you can walk or bike to work, and that's mostly Vancouver and the City of North Vancouver.

What time everyone leaves

The 7 o'clock hour is the busiest departure time both in Metro Vancouver (22.5% of commuters) and across Canada (26.3%). Metro Vancouver leans a little later than the country: 21.6% leave before 7, against 24.6% nationally.

The people who leave earliest also travel farthest. In Metro Vancouver, those who head out between 5 and 5:59 a.m. average 32.5 min one way, the longest of any departure slot, while the 9-to-noon crowd averages 24.3 min. Inside the region, the 5 a.m. Club is Maple Ridge, where 31.4% of commuters leave between 5 and 6:59, followed by Langley City (30.4%) and Pitt Meadows (29.5%). West Vancouver has the fewest early starters (11.2%).

Commute vs price: the trade-off, in numbers

For the latest prices behind that table, see my Greater Vancouver market update, the Surrey market report and Langley real estate. For more open data fun, there's when it snows in Vancouver and Canada's most common city trees. Browse Maple Ridge townhouses, North Vancouver listings or Vancouver condos, or get an instant evaluation of your current home.

How I did this

All commute numbers come from the 2021 Census of Population, the latest census with commuting results (released November 30, 2022). I downloaded Statistics Canada's table 98-10-0457-01 for metro areas and agglomerations, and pulled table 98-10-0458-01 for Metro Vancouver's 21 member municipalities through Statistics Canada's Web Data Service, on 2026-10-16. The query URLs are saved with the research for this post. The numbers are for all ages and genders combined.

Who's counted: employed people aged 15 and over in private households who have a usual place of work or no fixed workplace address. People who worked from home, or outside Canada, aren't in these tables at all. Commute duration is the usual one-way time to work, as people reported it. Main mode is "the main mode of transportation a person uses to travel to their place of work", in Statistics Canada's words. The census also assumes every trip starts at home, so a few unusual commutes (business trips, weekend commuters) are in the mix.

Two caveats matter. First, the census asked about commuting in May 2021, during the pandemic. Statistics Canada's release notes that 24.3% of Canadian workers were working at home then, and employment was still more than half a million below its February 2020 level. These are the most detailed city-by-city numbers available, but treat them as a 2021 snapshot. Second, they come from the 25% long-form sample, and Statistics Canada rounds counts, so small places (Anmore, Belcarra, Bowen Island and Lions Bay all have fewer than 5,000 commuters) are less reliable. I left those four out of the municipal rankings. Where Statistics Canada returned no value for a small cell, I counted it as zero.

Ottawa–Gatineau is one metro area that straddles two provinces; I used the combined figure. The commute calculator assumes 48 working weeks and a round trip equal to twice the average one-way commute. Municipal boundaries come from the BC government's legally defined administrative areas layer, simplified for the map. Municipality nicknames are mine and a joke. Asking prices come from EstateBlock's own listing data and are not sale prices.