Rethinking Suburban Commutes

Podcast Episode: 0260
Why suburban life lives on in a car free world

      ​Can commuter cities thrive in a future where cars aren't the driving force? Discover how these pivotal urban hubs, which have long balanced the allure of lower housing costs with the trials of car ownership and commuting, are navigating an evolving landscape. Through historical insights, we explore 

​the origin of commuter towns, which have transitioned from industrial worker havens to automobile-reliant communities in the 20th century, and consider why they remain vital in our modern world.

     I would call myself one, a commuter, somebody who travels from the outskirts into the edge of the city to go for work. But why do I do it? And why do I live 20 minutes away from any major commercial hub? Well, space, and, for me, costs as well. The price of my house is actually less than what I would have paid to live in the city and my taxes are less. But this comes with added costs the cost of owning multiple vehicles, the cost of lost time rushing home and the wear and tear on my automobile. But in all reality, why do we even have these tiny little commuter cities, or even small commuter towns, and why are they still prevalent today, when most of us are starting to look towards a future with less of an automobile presence? Well, today, AutoLooks is going to take a trip back and explain why the commuter cities of today are still going to be kicking around in a future of tomorrow.

​       Welcome back to the AutoLooks podcast. I am your host, as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our host website at AutoLooks.net. If you haven't been there, stop by. Check it out. Read some of the reviews. Check out some of the ratings. Go to the Corporate Links website page. Big or small, we have them all car companies from around the globe, all available on one centralized location, the AutoLooks.net website on the corporate links page. Yeah, you can find it all there. And while they're stopped by, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings and find all the podcasts we have done over the past six seasons up until now, all available on AutoLooks.net. The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed at PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over an [email protected]. 

      ​So, like I said in the beginning, commuter cities myself I am a commuter and if I essentially didn't have to rush home to get kids or daycare or you know anything like that, I could take the city bus to get to work. I would be regulated by my hours at work by taking the city bus, because I literally would have to catch the first bus in the morning at seven o'clock, just so I'd be there before eight, because if I don't catch the first bus, I won't be getting to work until after eight o'clock. So, I would literally have to get there earlier and, leaving, I would have to make sure I left a proper time to catch my bus to come home. Now I could do it if I actually wanted to, and I could still live in a commuter hub for myself. My small little commuter hub is on the outskirts of a major city. There is a small town just up the road from me. There's a grocery store, there's gas stations, the convenience stores, there's a liquor store, there's a couple pizza places Not every single thing I need. If I'm looking for a good burger, I got to go into town. If I need to do some full-scale grocery shopping and want to save a bit of money, I got to go into town. If I got to get some home renovations done, well, I can get some of the things out here, but not everything unless I'm willing to wait. So, I got to go into town for myself. Most of the stuff I need. I have to go into town. I have to commute into the city, into the city and even for myself.
 
       Before, at previous jobs that I had had, I may have lived in the industrial hubs outside of the major urban centers, but I still had to commute to get there. Because, trust me, taking a bus to my old job, that would have never happened. I would have got off the road and had to walk nearly three kilometers to get to work every single day, just because the bus didn't go into the industrial park. So, in a sense I had to commute. These small communities essentially house the workforce of larger cities. Now in my home city there's all kinds of little towns all over the place because of all the small mines that once existed or still exist today. So back in those days people had to be able to walk to work. So when they put one smelter in and one of the main towns, Falconbridge, they had to have employment close by, because at that point in time, when it was built in the early part of the 20th century, not everybody had an automobile and hell, not everybody was willing to take a horse to get there and because of our rocky terrain, a horse and buggy just really wasn't in the cards. So, they built towns and they built them close to the industrial center. So even though this town wasn't made for commerce and wasn't made for major manufacturing, it was made to house all the people for the smelter.
 
       And what's the purpose of the smelter? Well, they're taking the ore and they're smelting it down into nickel ingots. They can be shipped out and then made and processed into actual workable products they use in your daily life. You know I pay attention in school and I pay attention at our hometown Dynamic Earth Science Center. Yeah, plus, I've learned from it from my entire family. Mining's deep in my blood. But I love cars, so for myself these small, tiny little towns all had to have walking distance to them. 

​         Now, one of the original towns in the Greater Sudbury area was Copper Cliff and the entire thing was built to house everyone for the original smelter, for International Nickel Company, or as it was later called, INCO. Now, if you've ever seen the movie Men with Brooms, one of the top-grossing Canadian-made movies with Canadians in it, was made right here in Copper Cliff, Ontario. The small little community made to house all the people to be within walking distance or even a trolley or a horse ride to work. Well, as the automobile became more prevalent by the late 40s and into the 50s, the small little towns like Copper Cliff essentially became tiny little hubs for people to live with smaller incomes. And the people who could make larger incomes no longer had to live in these small little towns and walk by foot to get to work. They could live further out and drive to work, they could commute into the main city and essentially, even in the world today, a lot of people still commute by vehicle. The cities of Los Angeles in the United States and Toronto or actually let's put it in a better perspective we're going to go by traffic volumes Los Angeles in the United States and Montreal in the province of Quebec in Canada. Both of them have major traffic problems because both of them were made off commuter-based industries. Remember, Los Angeles was there and had perfect public transit for people to move about without the use of an automobile all the way up until the 1950s.
 
         By the 50s these big highways started coming in and making it easier for people to live further and further out. Then we developed these small little communities with all the amenities that they needed to house the people. So, we're not talking about a giant skyscraper in the middle of every single one of these places. No, we're talking about malls, convenience stores, hardware stores, tiny little fabrics of communities. So, you remember like centuries ago we all lived in major little urban centers, unless we lived on the outskirts and we were the farmers, or we lived in the bush and the loggers and the miners. We all lived all over the place. 

​          But if we're going to go way back, there were kingdoms and there were people who lived in the kingdom that supported the kingdom, but then there were people from the outskirts that had to bring stuff into the cities to sell them. They had to commute every once in a while, but because they were too far out it was not plausible. Henry Ford realized this when he was a teenager, when he left home just north of Detroit and walked into town. It took him a few hours to get into town, to only go a few miles. But by the time he came back from Detroit he was able to do it in mere minutes because he was able to drive home, which means now he can live on the outskirts of town. But when you live on the outskirts of town you eventually want to have things around you, so we build these urban centers. Essentially, it's a suburban urban life. Now this was really prevalent between the 40s and the 70s. Suburban life was blowing up and cars became king.
 
        As the men and women came back from World War II and the fighting was over, renewed interest in the automobile came about. Now they had money and they had time. They all wanted to have families and they all wanted to have kids. The baby boom caused this mass influx and demand for houses. Well, urban sprawl started happening, and sure we already had these major urban centers, big cities Like. Look at New York City. It had skyscrapers way back in the 1920s and they had the skyscraper wars during the 1920s and the city was going up and up and up and up and up and up. But to work in New York city you had to live in New York city. When the automobile really started to be pushed, you were able to work in New York city but live in new jersey. You could live across the river and work there. It's all because of the automobile, and a great invention around the turn of the century really helped spawn suburban life cookie cutter homes, homes Building small little modular homes, all based off the exact same principle and layouts, which means not every single house was different from the one next to it, which means houses can go up even faster and because of that we can now build things faster. We can build our strip malls faster; we can start adding industries.
 
      The freeways that slowly started to appear during the 1950s and all the way up until the 1980s across the globe started allowing us to live further away from urban centers. This created commuter life, but not everybody was into commuter life. But late 80s and into the 90s traffic started snarling all major centers and commuter life just became a hassle. And even though we started realizing that we needed to make more highways, those highways would never help because all these small commuter cities were eventually becoming urban centers, with so many people moving to them. Because of the prices being lower, there's more room to move about, taxes are lower, they can move out of the city, get away from that cluster of people, have freedom. But when you start moving out there and your neighbors start moving out there and your friends, your family all start moving out there, it will start to get crowded. 

          In the 1970s a businessman decided to buy out a massive number of farms outside of the city of Toronto. It's a tiny little village called Mississauga and he was going to build a fully functioning commuter city on the edge of Toronto. Because Toronto was growing and even though they were building big highways, there were still a multitude of different cities all vying for all the differences between the city. So, to build a brand-new expressway, you had to go through all of these communities to build it. This new development was going to take that life out of it. Mississauga was going to be a purposely planned commuter city of wide main roads, built on a perfect grid system, mazes upon mazes of streets Connecting to these cookie cutter houses all over the place and in the center of all of it, for everyone to enjoy, the biggest mall outside of downtown Toronto, square One, was going to be built right next to a brand new highway that was going in the 403. This originally had plans to go all the way down to Hamilton but kind of ended right at the edge of Mississauga. It was a couple of years later, but now it's technically the 407. The 403 doesn't go straight down. It should but it doesn't. And with that the commuter life grew.
 
        Mississauga, I watched it throughout the 80s, 90s and early 2000s of my lifetimes. I watched it go from this tiny little suburban-esque subdivision on the outskirts of the city of Toronto into being the second biggest metropolitan in the province of Ontario. Yeah, Mississauga is the second biggest. You can fight with me and say, oh, Ottawa’s bigger. But technically, Mississauga and its surrounding areas that it's now encompassing is slowly taking this over. Well, that was between the 70s and 80s.
 
      In the early 2000s, the city of Vaughan, just north of Toronto, where Canada's Wonderland is, was another commuter city. It was planned to be the brand new development of houses and to spearhead it all off, a brand new highway the 407, was put in and at that major interchange, the pinnacle of movie theater experiences, the Colossus by Famous Players, oh yeah, one of the biggest movie theaters in the entire country, massive IMAX screens sitting right there for all these people, plop down an Ikea, plop down a big Walmart and tons and tons, tons of houses. And a brand-new commuter city was born when I started college in 2001, The very first population sign ever went up for the city of Vaughan 30,000 people. The city of Vaughan now is getting close to cracking 400,000 people. It blew up because more people found it cheaper to live on the outskirts and commute in All because at that point in time we had a new highway. Well, this is where the problems were starting to take off and, with the automobile still being prevalent in commuter cities, we need to move away from this. The city of Toronto finally started to realize maybe we should put some subways and light rail systems in too for all the people that live in these outskirts communities, all the people that want to commute in should get off the highway and start getting on two trains. That was a great idea, but when COVID hit, that whole idea went out the window yet again. Because we can now work from home. A reliance left our foot traffic of urban centers to propulsion systems of our automobiles, e-bikes and even scooters and motorcycles. 

        The cost per mile or kilometer is way greater in suburban areas, stretching infrastructure to its limits. Having infrastructure in an urban core is cheaper to operate than it is in suburban areas. You might think, oh, it's just underneath the roads. In suburban areas it's easier to get to. Yes, but one house pays for a massive section of pipe as opposed to one condo building with hundreds of people in it paying for that pipe. You're literally stretching your infrastructure to its bare minimum, and I know this from my home city. In the community I live in, I have cable TV, I have high-speed internet, I have water, I have gas lines, I have garbage and recycling pickup, I have fire, I have police. I have everything, all major amenities, and I'm 20 minutes away from town, 20 minutes from a major urban center. Think about the cost of maintaining and keeping that infrastructure up, the cost per kilometer to keep those roads maintained, plowed and up to code. Well, this is stretching things thin. Our love affair with suburban life is great only if our population is blowing up. But when population's not growing as fast as it needs to be, the infrastructure is stretched to its limits. So now all these small commuter cities, these hubs, these little villages, if they're not growing up, these little villages, if they're not growing up to city status, then they're just tiny little villages.
 
        Like I said, by the end of the 90s the automobile was starting to give way. We were starting to lose our love affair with the automobile and commuting into town. By the time my generation started getting out into the public, we decided we wanted to live in urban centers. We thought it was great living close to everything, be able to walk to everything, bike to everything, take the subway, take a bus. It's all within our limits. Yeah, it's a great idea, until you start having kids and you try and raise kids in a condo. And you try and raise kids, well, you got to go pick them up from daycare and make sure you catch your subway to get there in time, or ride a bike or run there.
 
      It gets more hectic and that's why commuter cities are still kicking around, no matter what technology comes out and how much we autonomize to move, for us the commuter city is here to stay. And even though there's small villages and all that outside of major urban centers that are still growing exponentially, the commuter city will not disappear. Our format for commuter cities is starting to disappear, though. Where originally, our commuter cities were based off full, functioning automobile services and that is it, the commuter cities of today are now taking more of a personal transportation out of the equation. Yes, commuter cities of today. If you take a look at the city of Barrie, Ontario, just north of Toronto, they've just now not when I lived there 20 years ago, but now have a GO train that goes from the edge of essential urban living. The condo central space on their waterfront, where most urban dwellers will live, is within walking or biking distance of their main transportation hub for buses and trains. 

​           You can have a car to live in Barrie to go in and about and do all your groceries, but if you live in the urban core, you're still within walking distance of everything that you would love to have. Your automobile gets used a lot less. Even though you need space to store it. You still use it less. But we're now building up our infrastructure. We're building taller buildings, we're condensing our footprints, we're making it so that these commuter towns and commuter villages and commuter cities are growing up to a point where transportation corridors only go around the outside of the town. They can be utilized within the towns, but now light rail systems, HOV lanes, subways, buses, dedicated bike routes and autonomous travel are starting to take preference over our love affair with the automobile. Commuting around our commuter cities is still plausible with our automobile, but not 100% applicable to the situation. Today we started realizing that we need to start integrating more forms of transportation into not just our urban cores but our commuter cities. So, cities like Barrie and Vaughan and Milton are getting connected to the urban centers of Toronto.
 
         Like I said when I was a kid, where I used to live as a kid there were three buses a day and if I walked like I walk faster than the average person, I walk about eight and a half kilometers an hour Used to be 10 when I was in high school, a little slower now. I was over an hour and 15 minutes away from the main suburban area where everything was close to me, from where I had to take a bus in my tiny little hamlet or commuter town only had three buses a day. Today there's a bus at least every two hours into that area because they realize that people need to commute. See, these small commuter cities are still required in today's light because they have more space. It's still cheaper to build stuff out there and with it being cheaper, it keeps prices down. Land is more valuable in an urban setting, so trying to build geared to income or low-income subsidized living centers in an urban center is more costly than putting it on the commuter edge. Building them within the confines of commuter villages we can maximize our infrastructure that's already existing.
 
       Like I said, in my tiny little hamlet world I could take a bus to work. Now it's not perfect for me because it's limited on the amount, but for specific people, someone like me that just wants to move down from having a three-car driveway to, let's just say, say, a one-car driveway, it is plausible for me to do that. And these cities are starting to realize that they're building bike lanes all the way out to the outskirts so that I can commute. If I only work at the industrial fields at the edge of the city, I could bike to work. There are snow machine trails, there's a TransCanada trail, literally across the road from where I am, so I don't have to use my automobile to commute to work. I have other forms and, like I said, the city, like Barrie, Ontario, putting its main transportation infrastructure into one main spot. You can now get off the train and get onto a bus and if you live a city up in Orilla, you can get off your train and get on the PMCL or Ontario Northland bus and go up the road. Hell. You can get off your GO train, take the bus to the edge of the city for where you parked your vehicle and a carpool lot. We can now live in commuter cities and not have to fully utilize our automobile. 

​        In the world of today, our cities are becoming more interconnected and, as Toyota put it together, building their woven city, a fully integrated, autonomous city where the use of an automobile is limited to its minuscule form, cities like this are what's shaping the future. You might just think oh, it's a new type of city, it's a new urban center within an urban center, but that urban center still has to be a commute-friendly place. And that's the world we're slowly starting to get into, a reliance on free-flow travel that we are in control of is starting to diminish, and I'm not just talking about autonomous technology coming to automobiles. No, I'm talking about a reliance on our automobiles. Like I said, I could take the bus to work if I wanted to.
 
         My brother is 45 years old. He has never once owned a vehicle ever. He now has a family, so he lives in a more commuter-friendly village. He's within walking or biking distance to everything he needs to go and access for his family, pick his kids up, drop his kids off and if he needs to go into town to go to work, he can commute without the use of an automobile, but for convenience. If he did have an automobile, he could get around his commuter lifestyle a little more easily. But that's where things like Uber and Lyft have come in. We're reducing our reliance on automobiles. Even in the suburban areas, even within our commute city, we can now take a train home. We can get off the train and into an Uber and we can be driven home to where our car sits Most of the week in our driveway never gets used. We commute by foot, we commute, we commute through automobile sharing.
 
         Commuter cities are still here, and even with some of these cities becoming major urban centers. Today, Mississauga is no longer a commuter city. It's the city people commute to. On the outskirts of Mississauga, Ontario, is a small, tiny little village was small it's not anymore of Milton, Ontario. Milton has now passed over 150,000 people and is growing exponentially, but is still considered a commuter city. Eventually it'll turn into an urban center. Vaughn is slowly moving into its urban-style center. It originally was a commuter city in the early 2000s when I was there. Now it's slowly transitioning into an urban core. Its outlining areas are where people live in houses and can commute to the urban core.
 
        We can now use different forms of transportation and our modes of transportation have been properly planned. We haven't just been jamming every single thing in there, thinking it'll all work. That was the biggest problem with the original suburbanized ideas. You build one massive freeway that everybody can get onto to come into the main city, but that's not that smart, because when the commuter town triples in size, that's that many more vehicles on that one highway going into town. Oh, let's just build more highways, more people could commute. Well, that's good, but now we're spending more and more and more infrastructure money building more highways so more people could commute into the town. Well, instead of building dedicated transportation lanes, instead of building light rail systems, instead of building more subways, instead of expanding our bus routes, we need to commute and we need to get into town, and not everybody can afford to live in a major urban center, so there are a lot of us out there that have to commute. 

          I don't know how many times I've heard stories about people who live in all kinds of different cities, who either walk or take a bus and spend like an hour and a half of their day trying to get from the outskirts of their commuter lifestyle into the major industrial cores of urban centers. They do that to get to their job, but they can't afford to have an automobile, so they commute on public transit. But now that public transit is getting better, this commute is getting better and quicker, and that's where we need to realize this. The automobile plays a vital role in the future of transportation. You have to remember the automobile essentially took over from where the wagon left off and remember how long the wagon was in existence, you know, like a few thousand years. You think the automobile is just going to be kicked to the curb just because we feel that we need to walk on our feet a little more often. No, the automobile is going to be here and we're still going to be using it to commute from our small hamlets and villages into the urban centers, but a future of tomorrow is going to give us more opportunities to use different forms of transportation to get in there.
 
        As we try and bring down the costs of the infrastructure to support suburban living, we're finding more ingenious ways of getting more people off our roads and more people jammed into smaller confines. A railway can carry more people than a single lane highway. That's your infrastructure dollars Hard at work. So, when we start believing this and seeing that building the proper infrastructure to our commuter zones allows people to still stay in the commuter zones but have less dependent on what they originally had, I don't know how many times today I hear about people talking about urban sprawl. That's the reason why highways like 410, 427, even the 404 won't be extended further north, because it's going to cause all this massive urban sprawl.
 
       Out there. People will just get in their cars and go into town. Well, that is correct. If we do that, there will be more people inclined to move to the small hamlets so they can commute into town because they're less occupied highways. But if we build the proper infrastructure there in the first place, add a light rail system all the way out there, we can ease congestion on the main infrastructure corridor. The city of Calgary is actually doing that right now, as they're building their light rail system all the way from downtown Calgary to the small hamlet of Cochrane, Alberta, which is exploding in population. Now it's at the end of a major freeway, but it's also going to be at the end of their light rail system and the end of their major transit hub. They know that every form of transportation has to be there to make it all work properly so people can live where it's cheaper to own a house and commute to where they work, because in the end, that's all we need. We just need a roof over our head, food in our stomach and a job that pays the bills. And to do that we've got to commute from somewhere and whether we like it or not, some of us have no choice but to move to a commuter city. 

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       And after that, stop by, read some of the reviews, check out some of the rigs, go to the corporate links website page. Big or small, we have them all car companies from around the globe, all available on one specific site, the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at [email protected]. So, from myself, Everett Jay, the host of the AutoLooks podcast and the owner of the AutoLooks.net website from PodBean.com and Ecomm Entertainment Group, strap yourself in for this one fun wild ride that our life in the commuter lane is going to take us on.
 
Everett J.
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