The latest Quality of Life survey by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) found that 37% of commuters in the country’s most populous province spend between 16 and 30 minutes driving to work.
A good 22% have a longer commute of between 31 and 45 minutes, while 18% get to their place of employment in under 15 minutes.
With the return to office en masse following the winding down of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, one might think that driving to work is the most frequent reason for South Africans to leave their homes in 2024, but that’s not the case.
The GCRO survey discovered that despite work-from-home not being as popular as it once was, travelling to work is the second most commonly cited reason people leave their homes, with shopping being the first.
“Before the pandemic, the most commonly cited purpose for trip-making was to get to work (36%), and the second most commonly cited purpose was to go shopping (29%),” said GCRO.
“During the pandemic, shopping overtook commuting to work. The reason for this is that during the pandemic people were travelling less for work, and less in general, meaning that trips to shops became the most commonly cited purpose of many respondents’ trip-making.”
Today, the survey shows there has only been a partial return to pre-pandemic patterns.
Shopping has fallen from 44% in 2020/21 to 34% in 2023/24. Yet interestingly, it remains the most commonly cited purpose for the most frequently taken trip.
“Instead of bouncing back up, commuting to work has in fact fallen from 34% during the pandemic to 32% in 2023/24,” noted the GCRO.
The GCRO furthermore queried motorists on the average length of their most frequent trips.
It determined that shopping trips were often shorter during the pandemic than in 2020/21.
The percentage of respondents who took less than 15 minutes to reach shops dropped, from 48% in 2020/21 to 41% in 2023/24.
There has also been a slight increase in those who took between 16 and 30 minutes, from 37% to 41%.
A similar pattern emerged for commuting to work.
Whereas 23% of respondents took 15 minutes or less to get to work in 2020/21, this decreased to 18% in 2023/24.
“The increase in shopping and work trips that took less than 15 minutes during 2020/21 – relative to previous years – may be attributed to changes in work arrangements (including remote working) and reduced traffic,” said GCRO.
“The decrease in work and shopping trips that took less than 15 minutes, and the increase in commuting time since 2020/21, can be attributed to the return to normalcy following the easing of lockdown restrictions post-Covid. Travelling times may also have been elongated by loadshedding-induced traffic congestion.”
Popular modes of transportation
The primary modes of transport for the most frequent trips in Gauteng have stayed relatively constant over the last few years.
The most recent survey shows that minibus taxis (41%) and private vehicles (32%) remain the wheels of choice for residents in the province, followed by walking (23%) – the latter of which increased slight by four percentage points from 2020/21.
“The increase in walking, and the relative slight decrease in the use of minibus taxis and private vehicles, might be due to the rising costs of transportation amidst post-Covid socio-economic challenges,” said GCRO.
“It might also be because more and more people are unemployed and so their main trip out may be, say, a walk to local shops.”
Another interesting statistic is that, before the pandemic, only 3% of respondents used rail for their most frequent trips, which collapsed to virtually zero (0.4%) in 2020/21 following widespread theft and vandalism that brought the country’s rail network to its knees.
Although there has been a slight increase to 1% in 2023/24, this is still short of the already very small percentage using rail before the pandemic.
E-hailing services are growing in popularity among the populace, too.
On average, some 33% of respondents said that they make use of e-hailing services, though the data is skewed toward higher-income households.
“What is interesting here is that although e-hailing services can be more costly than other modes of public transport (e.g. minibus taxis), some 10% of respondents in the lowest income group (R1–R800) still make use of them,” said GCRO.
“The fact that a portion of respondents in low-income categories are using e-hailing services demonstrates that this transport option is not an exclusively high-end one.”
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