How long does it take Aussies to get to work compared with the rest of the world?

How long does it take Aussies to get to work compared with the rest of the world?

IT’S the everyday ordeal driving ordinary Australians to their wits end.

Four and five hour commutes on top of eight, 10 and 12 hour work days have become the standard for tens of thousands of Australians forced outside of our major cities by the housing affordability crisis.

“It’s f**ken tough, I’ll tell you that. It’s f***en a bit hard,” says Nathaneal Stephens, 25, a concreter and road worker from the Central Coast.

In order to save for a deposit on a home, he works six days a week, waking at 4:30am each morning to spend an average of three to five hours a day in the car commuting. Much of which is spent in gridlock.

“It’s a major added pressure to a wellbeing or mentality. It’s added cause to depression in the long run. It’s impacting that’s for sure,” he says.

“You’re cranky, you’re crabby, you just wanna go to bed. You never have the energy to socialise properly and I think that’s the biggest impact it’s had on me: not having enough energy to be able to socialise in a happy mood or mindset,” he says.

For Nathaneal, and the tens of thousands like him, there is no choice. The jobs where he lives simply don’t pay well enough to pay off a home.

“Up on the coast you don’t get the same money you’ll get in the city … It’s almost a $10 (per hour) difference,” he says.

“(But) having better affordability for a house up there, if you really want a decent lifestyle and to live comfortably you have to work down here (in Sydney) … It’s just a f***ing shambles.”

If he’s any hope of owning a home in his area he’s facing at least 20 more years of this.

“Something has to change, I couldn’t do this for that long. I’m looking at this going two years at the most I can be doing this. You’d have to resign and give yourself a job closer to home because this is not healthy, it’s not healthy at all,” he says.

The NSW government’s Greater Sydney Commission, chaired by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s wife, Lucy Turnbull, has begun planning to alleviate some of the city’s working and commuting infrastructure problems by the year 2056.

Kyle Price, aged 30 today, will be 70 by then. He thought he did everything right — studied, got a well-paid job at Google, and combined incomes with his partner to try and pay off a home, also on the Central Coast of NSW due to the housing affordability crisis.

He leaves home at 5:30am each morning to catch the train to Pyrmont in the heart of Sydney and arrives home around 7pm. It’s a routine he describes as “heartbreaking”.

“It’s basically heartbreak. On a Tuesday or Wednesday when the end of the week is not insight you’re like, ‘goddamn it I’ve gotta do this all over again tomorrow’. It’s rough. It’s disheartening,” he says.

Added up, the four hours he spends commuting each day equals 52 days a year spent simply getting to and from work. Like Nathaneal, he is beginning to notice mental and physical deterioration due to his exhausting schedule.

“You get no time during the week to unwind and refresh after a day’s work. You get home, make dinner, get your clothes ready for the next day, wake up, and do it all again.”

“It’s very, very stressful. It’s had an impact on me physically; I’m constantly stressed, you feel yourself ageing, you feel your body getting tight, it’s tough,” he says.

Geoffrey Clifton, a lecturer in Transport and Logistics Management at the University of Sydney, describes the problem as “quite severe,” with Australians averaging longer commute times than even the United States.

“As housing gets more unaffordable, young Aussies are having to settle for smaller apartments, flat sharing or living further away from their work,” begins Clifton.

“We concentrate jobs in the inner cities and the affordable housing in the outer suburbs. This leads to long radial commutes.”

Clifton blames poor city planning and a reluctance to develop employment opportunities outside our major cities for the problems.

“There needs to be a change in the way we design our cities; more housing construction and more diversity of housing types so people have more choice about where they live. This means allowing people to develop smaller units in the inner city (and bigger ones for families). Plus allowing more apartments and townhouses to be built in the already developed middle suburbs and creating a range of housing types in new built outer suburbs,” he says.

“We also need to reduce restrictions on developing employment opportunities in the outer suburbs so people don’t have to commute longer distances. We see the problem everyday where people are squeezing onto crowded trains to get to the jobs in the city centre but the trains in the other direction are empty.”