Moved from Toronto to Hamilton and
my commute improved. (and I don't work in Hamilton)
It's all a matter of careful selection of location. To follow up to this, I have a 1h15min commute between my Hamilton front door and my cubicle downtown Toronto. This is a faster commute than many people who live elsewhere (e.g. Brampton or Oshawa, or even Mississauga and Markham). I live in a location west of Gage park, just one block away from the Main/King arterial roads that allows me to get to Aldershot in a 13-15 minute drive following the synchronized traffic lights of on the one-way arterial road (Main-King) before rush hour traffic (exactly 6 mins drive from house to 403), and catch one of the peak-period express GoTrains that takes under an hour (55-58min) to Union. Throw in the 3-5 minute walk to the downtown Toronto job. The commute isn't bad really; it is all a matter of selecting where to live in Hamilton, and you can actually get work done on the GoTrain too, something you can't behind the driving wheel. And I can leave work early or late, since the GoTrains just started (as of last year) running
GOTrains now started running every 30-minute all day long, 7 days of week, bi-directionally to Union to past midnight on the Lakeshore line. As long as you choose the peak express gotrains that skips stations, they get to Union in under an hour.
And with the new Hamilton GOTrain station, eventual all-day 30-minute GoTrain frequency direct to Hamilton (it's just one stop beyond Aldershot), plus future planned electricification of GOTrain (commute falls to 40min Hamilton-Toronto, frequency improves to every 15min, like an European express commuter train), it is only going to get better. Union revitalization is tripling the square footage of GO concourse, in anticipation of the assured GO expansion.
I also have a 2nd income with a home office, so that may grow and eliminate my commute someday, but for now, if you carefully select where to live in Hamilton, it is now actually comfortably feasible to keep a Toronto downtown job, while owning a Hamilton home.
I used to live in Ottawa and commute to a Montreal contract for a few months, while I also used to live in Toronto and commute to Waterloo for a contract for a few months, too (Often went Monday morning and returned Friday evenings, renting a room there). Living in Hamilton has a far better and faster commute than those combinations. Detached 4-bedroom forever house with basement home theater, and a backyard oasis with heated swimming pool, all for less than the price of a downtown Toronto 2-bedroom condo. A mortgage cheaper than the cost of Toronto 2-bedroom downtown rent, but with three to four times the square footage, and I get to finally build equity/nestegg when I almost gave up on the house dream.
The biggest Hamilton surprise (for me, unexpectedly) is
less air pollution than Toronto (at least during year 2014, as a daily commuter between the cities) -- ever since Hamilton shut down the majority of its coke ovens. I haven't smelled any tar in this neighborhood. It used to be far more grimy, but Hamilton is getting much cleaner. Doing more research, I see charts where many air quality metrics are better than Toronto on average recently (e.g. lower ozone, lower nitrogen oxides), particulates falling to less than Toronto recently, though Sulpher dioxide higher but dramatically fell when the coke ovens shut down. See
air quality improving article, and
old 2009 measurements (I gander that the numbers are even better now in 2014 due to the coke oven shutdowns, and based on my daily comparative experience as a daily commuter). The silly misconception that Hamilton air is worse than Toronto air -- used to be still true last decade with the smells still reaching downtown -- but I consider it a mythbust now, and my daily comparative exposure to Hamilton odors versus Toronto odors, etc.
