Urban Studies, Vol. 44, No.

11, 2195– 2210, October 2007

Modalities of the New Middle Class: Ideology and

Behaviour in the Journey to Work from Gentrified
Neighbourhoods in Canada

Martin Danyluk and David Ley

[Paper first received, August 2006; in final form, December 2006]

Summary. This study examines the relationship between gentrification and the transport mode
selected for the journey to work. A review of surveys, ethnographies and electoral records shows
a liberal and anti-suburban ideology associated with gentrification, including endorsement of
sustainability and the public household. Consequently, one would expect to find non-automobile
transport prevailing in gentrified districts. Data secured from the Census of Canada permit this
proposition to be examined for the central cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
The results show some complexity, due in part to divisions internal to gentrified neighbourhoods.
The most robust results reveal an overrepresentation of cycling to work in gentrified districts
and, surprisingly in light of a putative left-liberal ideology, an underutilisation of public
transport compared with other districts.

Introduction: The Yaletown Enigma

A stroll along one of the cramped streets in provide excellent linkages for pedestrians
the upscale Yaletown district in downtown with the service, retail and leisure establish-
Vancouver reveals an unexpected sight. In ments, as well as offering outdoor restaurant
this newly gentrified neighbourhood, former space. Nearby, a waterfront boardwalk and a
light industry and warehouses have been con- cluster of parks provide space for cycling and
verted into boutique shops and residential jogging, perfect for the “active person who
lofts imitating New York’s SoHo, or else loves urban life” (Concord Pacific, 1999).
have been demolished to permit high-rise The downtown commercial district is a
condominium redevelopment. Yaletown rep- close 10 – 15 minute walk away. The street
resents post-industrial planning à la mode: experience is cosmopolitan, presenting post-
mixed medium- to high-density land uses modern urban vitality and sensuality;
juxtapose work, home and leisure space, per- Thomas Hutton (2004, p. 1976) has called
mitting quick connections from labour, to Yaletown a landscape of “textured pro-
rest, to recreation. Indeed, live-work lofts duction”. The richness of amenities invites
permit software and design professionals to exploration on foot.
integrate all three uses into their dwelling However, Yaletown is swarming with cars.
unit. Sidewalks, along former warehouse They are, for the most part, expensive and
loading bays, some of them metres above imported; they glisten and hum as they line
road level, dominate the streetscape and the block, waiting for a parking spot.
Martin Danyluk and David Ley are in the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall Vancouver,
British Columbia, V6T 1Z2, Canada. Fax: 604 822 6150. E-mail: martindanyluk@hotmail.com and dley@geog.ubc.ca
0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online/07/112195 –16 # 2007 The Editors of Urban Studies
DOI: 10.1080/00420980701520277
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2196 MARTIN DANYLUK AND DAVID LEY
Amongst the restaurants and designer clothes
and furniture stores, comes a retail surprise:
a boutique Mini Cooper showroom that pre-
sumably sells a vehicle suitable for Yale-
town’s cramped quarters. The presence of a
car dealer in a high-priced in-town district
provides a clue to a statistical anomaly in a
downtown otherwise monopolised by ped-
estrians. Only 26 per cent of residents in the
Yaletown census tract walked to work in
2001, a level at least 15 per cent lower than
that found in any neighbouring downtown
census tract. Meanwhile, 57 per cent drove a
car—almost 20 per cent more than any adja-
cent tract. The large proportion of highly edu-
cated professionals living in Yaletown must
certainly be aware of the ill effects of auto-
mobile usage on health, the natural environ-
ment and urban sprawl. Yet they continue to
drive significantly more than their peers in
downtown Vancouver. What values inform
this choice? And does Yaletown represent a
larger trend, or is it an outlier in the tail-end
of a statistical distribution?
This study explores the linkages between
gentrification and the preferred travel mode
for the journey to work. Probably because of
the difficulty of reconciling two topics as
divergent as these, previous research attempt-
ing to do so has been extremely limited. Two
related studies (LeRoy and Sonstelie, 1983;
Lin, 2002) have considered only one mode
of transport (public transit) and assumed a
one-way relationship, where access to transit
stops was shown to increase nearby land
values. Without discrediting the importance
of those findings, this study explores the
other direction of the relationship: it asks
whether gentrification is associated with dis-
tinctive patterns of journey-to-work travel.
Through a discussion of gentrification, and
the political attitudes of the new middle
class, we situate inner-city gentrified neigh-
bourhoods within the political context of
social liberalism, an ideology normally
associated with environmental sustainability,
social equity, the public household, health
and fitness, and a sense of connectedness
with the physical fabric of the city.
Consequently, we hypothesise that gentrified
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neighbourhoods should be associated dispro-
portionately with non-automobile forms of
travel. To explore this thesis, we employ
data from 2001 and earlier censuses for
Canada’s three largest cities, computing cor-
relations between gentrification and the trans-
port mode used to travel to work at the scale of
the census tract. The results show that perhaps
Yaletown is an exception to the typical gentri-
fied district—but not nearly by as much as we
might have anticipated.
The paper, then, contributes to two inter-
related literatures that are rarely brought
together. For the gentrification literature, it
asks the question: in what manner is a com-
monly left-liberal urban ideology played out
in a repetitive aspect of daily behaviour, the
selection of the mode of urban travel? For the
field of urban transport planning and policy,
it seeks to identify the impacts of the growing
embourgeoisement of inner-city neighbour-
hoods upon possible changes in patterns of
demand for public and private transport.
Gentrification and Political Ideology
Gentrification is a process involving the
movement of distinctive sections of the
middle class into historically poorer inner-
city neighbourhoods. It typically includes
housing renovation or redevelopment, rising
property values, local retail upgrading,
the transformation of local voluntary organis-
ations and the displacement of long-
established residents and small businesses.
More recently reinvestment in downtown
neighbourhoods has extended to the redeve-
lopment of former railyards, waterfronts and
underutilised industrial sites in large mixed-
use development that includes a large
number of residential units, usually condomi-
niums at relatively high densities. There has
been some disagreement as to whether such
brownfield redevelopment should qualify as
gentrification, since the areas were not for-
merly residential and no on-site displacement
of existing residents is occurring. However, a
consensus is emerging that large projects such
as Toronto’s Concord CityPlace on the former
Railway Lands or Vancouver’s Concord
 MODALITIES OF THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS
Pacific site on a one-time industrial waterfront
are part of the post-industrial embourgeoise-
ment of the central city and qualify as
gentrified landscapes. Gentrification was first
named in London in the 1960s (Hamnett,
2003) and has impacted many cities in the
global North, particularly those with a
well-defined post-industrial employment
profile, including a large proportion of pro-
fessional and managerial jobs shaping a new
middle class employed in advanced services
(Ley, 1996). More recently, the process has
been expanding beyond core cities of the
global North (Atkinson and Bridge, 2005),
while in world cities like London or
New York where the process has been under-
way for 40 years, gentrification is not only
colonising new spaces but is also taking new
spatial forms (Hackworth and Smith, 2001;
Butler with Robson, 2003; Lees, 2003;
Hamnett, 2003).
From an idiosyncratic side-show, gentrifica-
tion has become a significant presence in the
inner cities of metropolitan areas with a well-
defined post-industrial economy. A recent
examination of gentrification in 10 Canadian
cities between 1981 and 2001 showed that
even with extensive screening of census
tracts—removing high-income tracts and
tracts with extensive redevelopment (including
condominium development, which many
would see as an indicator of central-city gentri-
fication)—20 per cent of inner-city dwelling
units in Toronto and Vancouver gentrified in
the 1971–2001 period and 12 per cent of
units in Montreal (Meligrana and Skaburskis,
2005); adding a second category of less
certain cases of gentrification raised the totals
to close to a quarter of all inner-city units in
Montreal, over a third in Vancouver and over
40 per cent in Toronto. And this figure does
not include existing inner-city élite districts or
districts with a high proportion of new
construction.
The growth of gentrification is related to an
expansion of the housing sub-markets drawn
to such neighbourhoods. Initially in the
1970s, gentrification was seen largely in
terms of a class of well-educated young
urban professionals in one- or two-person
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2197
adult households. They were commonly
employed as social and cultural professionals,
and included artists, media professionals, tea-
chers and community workers. As the market
consolidated, wealthier professionals, such as
lawyers and financial professionals, were
eventually drawn into the market—these are
the ‘super-gentrifiers’ identified by Lees
(2003). Other sub-markets now include
families with children and empty-nest and
retired households attracted to the amenities
of the central city. As the process has commo-
dified further in major cities, there is evidence
of an additional group of wealthy immigrants
and corporate buyers entering the market,
some of whom may use their central-city con-
dominium on a seasonal or irregular basis
only. By the present decade with gentrifica-
tion at a mature phase, neighbourhood tran-
sition in major cities involving each of these
sub-markets is occurring in separate inner-
city locations.
The stage model of gentrification offers
some insights here, although there are fre-
quent departures from the ideal typical
sequence of three successive middle-class
groups (Hamnett, 2003). In the model, a
lower-middle class of professionals and pre-
professionals (students) seeking inexpensive
housing in the inner city comprises the first
wave of gentrification. The presence of
artists among this group has been a strong pre-
dictor of subsequent gentrification (Ley, 1996,
2003). Artists gravitate towards central
locations with low rents and high degrees of
social diversity. Soon after their arrival, they
are joined by a broader stratum of social and
cultural workers, the ‘cultural new class’
including arts, design and media workers,
educators and social and health care
workers. Although generally highly educated
professionals, this sub-group of the new
middle class shares something of the artists’
valuation of bohemian landscapes and urban
authenticity (Lloyd, 2006). These residents,
in turn, are succeeded in a third stage by
increasingly affluent gentrifiers in an ascend-
ing economic hierarchy, including corporate
lawyers, medical specialists, business people
and capitalists.
2198 MARTIN DANYLUK AND DAVID LEY
These demographic trends are a useful start-
ing-point in deciphering the broader value
systems that inform gentrifiers’ attitudes,
choices and behaviour concerning urban
travel. An understanding of the political orien-
tation of the new middle class provides
additional insight into these attributes. With
the notable exception of the final wave of
capitalists, the new-middle-class occupations
associated with gentrification share three
tendencies that are important in shaping politi-
cal identity. First, they are frequently sustained
and financed by public institutions or by the
government itself. They depend on the collecti-
vist policies of social liberalism and govern-
ment intervention, and thus may be more
likely to support left-of-centre policies.
Secondly, many occupations within the new
middle class can be read as having objectives
beyond the mere pursuit of profit or personal
gain. Fields such as psychology, nursing,
justice, planning, social work and education
are ‘helping’ occupations where attention is
focused on improving the status of others.
Hence, we might expect their practitioners to
sympathise with disadvantaged or marginalised
groups, supporting a politics that prioritises the
collective good or the public household over
individual goals. Cotgrove and Duff (1980,
p. 343) found a high incidence of liberalism
among those in occupations concerned with
“the pursuit of non-economic values”,
including doctors, social workers, teachers
and creative professionals. Finally, these
occupations require often lengthy post-second-
ary education, frequently with specialisations
in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
A body of research has argued that highly
educated people express more liberal views
on a variety of issues, including democratic
values, civil liberties, foreign policy and
tolerance (see Brint, 1984; Weil, 1985;
Kriesi, 1989; Weakliem, 2002). Known as the
‘enlightenment effect’, its validity is especially
strong among those in the arts, humanities and
social sciences, faculties that provided many
recruits who supported the critical politics
of the 1960s student movement and the
social movements that followed from it
(Ley, 2003).
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Based on these commonalities and the pol-
itical implications they carry, we can surmise
that the orientation of the new middle class
should fall, on the whole, towards left-liberal
political values. As early as the 1970s,
researchers noticed this trend and attempted
to draw linkages between young, educated
professionals (and pre-professionals) and
left-liberal political movements. Brint’s
(1984) detailed empirical analysis of the pol-
itical attitudes of this ‘new class’ in the US
found varying degrees of liberalism and
dissent towards business attitudes. Yet in
occupational terms, it was only the social
and cultural professionals among this group
that demonstrated consistently strong liberal
views. Education and youthfulness were also
important indicators of left-liberal politics.
It is precisely this educated class of younger
social and cultural professionals that are
implicated in the first two stages of gentrifica-
tion. Caulfield’s (1994) ethnography of early
gentrifiers in inner Toronto showed a consist-
ent pattern of left-liberal party support among
a population with a high incidence of public-
sector social and cultural professionals
A preponderance of respondents explicitly
indicated an affiliation with some variety
of ‘progressive’ or left politics . . . focusing
on a range of social, economic, and
environmental dilemmas that confront the
city (Caulfield, 1994, p. 223).
Walks (2004, 2006) has shown the longevity
of a left-liberal vote in the central cities of
Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, compared
with their suburbs, over a series of recent
federal elections, a political response that
includes, but is not limited to, gentrified dis-
tricts. Examining municipal elections in
Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal in the
1980s, Ley (1994) found that in five cases
out of six, electors in gentrified tracts gave
above-average support to progressive candi-
dates. Among gentrifying areas, support for
social liberalism was strongest in older neigh-
bourhoods dominated by social and cultural
professionals and weaker in areas of condomi-
nium redevelopment. The relationship was
strongest in Montreal, where a progressive
 MODALITIES OF THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS
councillor and former community organiser,
in describing his party’s typical supporter,
also provided a profile of the quintessential
gentrifier
Well-educated, 25 – 45 years old, a pro-
fessional, probably in the public sector,
but not necessarily career-oriented . . . has
other goals instead (Ley, 1996, p. 279).
However, a reform councillor in Toronto
offered a longer time-horizon
The first [middle-class] wave consisted of
young professionals committed to down-
town mixed neighbourhoods. They didn’t
have much money, but were self-reliant,
made connections with neighbours, and
joined in community action. They were
social workers and in other social services,
in the arts, academics, some doctors and
lawyers. They were progressive but not
necessarily far left. Reform leadership con-
sisted of first-wave gentrifiers. What they
shared in common was a concern for neigh-
bourhoods and the quality of life. The
second wave were those drawn by real
estate deals and a spicy neighbourhood
(Ley, 1996, p. 290).
The Urban Ideology of Gentrifiers and
Modes of Travel
Links between gentrification and progressive
causes may then be more nuanced than we
would have first expected, with the ‘first-
wave’ gentrifier in renovated properties
being likely to be a good deal more inclined
to support left-liberal causes than later
middle-class arrivals, especially those living
in new-build units. Yet in at least one area
we see considerable agreement: both groups
are urban people, reacting against the
suburbs and suburban ideologies. The carica-
ture of North American car culture, with its
evocative imagery of sprawling suburbs,
homogeneous single-family houses and rigid
gender divisions, is a frequent target of anti-
suburban sentiment in the middle-class inner
city. It is precisely this sentiment, embodied
in the advertising by-line ‘be bold or move
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2199
to suburbia’, that helped to sell out gentrified
inner-city properties in Vancouver’s Wood-
ward’s Building in a single day (Woodward’s
District, 2006). Caroline Mills’ ethnography
of the nearby Fairview Slopes, a condomi-
nium district in inner Vancouver, identified
residents who were uniformly opposed to
suburban living
I hope and pray that if I ever have to move
on the basis of some sort of really altered
circumstances, I’ll still be able to live in
the city. I do not want to live in the
suburbs, I don’t think it would ever suit
me (Mills, 1989, p. 371).
This viewpoint was matched by first-wave
gentrifiers in inner Toronto, where not one
of the 63 households interviewed was pre-
pared to contemplate the prospect of suburban
life (Caulfield, 1994). With such sentiment,
mobility by public transport, cycling or
walking might represent an alternative urban
ideology to suburban travel behaviour, per-
mitting an authentic physical engagement
with the varied textures of the inner city.
More positively, respondents in both the
Vancouver and Toronto samples were
absorbed by urban living, exploring urban
landscapes and amenities and, where possible,
encountering the city viscerally on foot.
Caulfield’s respondents were particularly
ardent.
They like living in a place that, unlike most
suburbs, has a history and has ghosts—a
past that downtown’s buildings make tangi-
ble. And they like walking. Again there was
near-unanimity among the sample: almost
every respondent said that s/he enjoyed
walking to the corner store, walking to
local restaurants or pubs, walking to
friends’ houses, or just walking for the
sake of walking (Caulfield, 1994, p. 191;
original emphasis).
In contrast
If I lived in a suburb, I’d probably end up
going to the mall for everything. It would
be a mall culture, and I’d have to get a car
(Caulfield, 1994, p. 193).
2200 MARTIN DANYLUK AND DAVID LEY
This attitude is reminiscent of a large survey
in three Norwegian cities, evaluating the
advantages of inner-city living, that empha-
sised “‘liberation’ from motorized transport”
as an asset of gentrified neighbourhoods
(Hjorthol and Bjornskau, 2005, p. 353). More-
over, urban planning in the central city over
the past 20 years has promoted such mobility
through providing additional public spaces for
non-motorised transport, including enhanced
pedestrian access to the St Lawrence River
in Montreal and Lake Ontario in Toronto,
and the extension of walking and cycle
trails, like the 12-kilometre Lachine Canal
corridor in Montreal, and in Vancouver the
dedicated bicycle greenways and the ever-
expanding pedestrian and cycle seawall
around the downtown core that now exceeds
15 kilometres in length.
Walking and cycling are closely associated
with interests in personal health and fitness,
and commercial fitness centres are heavily
concentrated in gentrifying districts, even dis-
counting the fitness clubs built into many
central-city condominiums. The explicit
relationship between health and urban form
has been highlighted recently in research doc-
umenting the close ties between low residen-
tial density, automobile dependency and
obesity and other health problems, including
the remarkable finding that
Each additional hour spent in a car per day
was associated with a 6 per cent increase in
the likelihood of obesity (Frank et al., 2004,
p. 87).
Such findings have led to pilot health pro-
motion projects encouraging workers to use
‘active transport modes’ (walking, cycling
and public transport) in their daily journey to
work (Wen et al., 2005).
Non-automobile travel is also consistent
with commitment to environmental sustain-
ability, and connections between the reform
politics of gentrifiers and specific attitudes
towards transport are suggested by studies
linking social and cultural professionals to
environmental movements (Cotgrove and
Duff, 1980). The valuation of environmental
and social sustainability is a significant part
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of the left-liberal ideology and it informs
receptive attitudes towards sustainable and
accessible transport.
This theoretical literature on the ideologies
of gentrifers leads to a set of expectations that
as a group they would favour sustainable
forms of transport on environmental, social
and health or fitness grounds. Turning to the
transport studies literature, there is tangential
research relevant to these expectations. Most
pertinent is Plaut’s (2005) analysis of the
2001 American Housing Survey that exam-
ined the profiles of commuters using non-
motorised travel modes. Walkers and cyclists
were more likely to have lower incomes than
car drivers, had shorter trips to work and were
typically younger. At the same time, cyclists
were more likely to have post-secondary edu-
cation, including a bachelor’s degree, than
either pedestrians or drivers; a British study
also concluded that post-secondary education
was a strong predictor of bicycle commuting
(Gardiner and Hill, 1997). Plaut’s (2005)
results showed that walkers and cyclists
tended to live in apartments and smaller
housing units and thereby in districts with
higher densities, typically in central cities.
Overall, age, college education and household
size are all associated with non-motorised
modes of commuting. While relevant and sug-
gestive of the early stages of gentrification, it
is important to remember that American cities
are typically of lower density, have less well-
developed public transport systems and are
more automobile-friendly than Canadian
cities. Kenworthy and Laube (1999) note the
importance of population density within
Canada, pointing out that Toronto’s high
urban density and extensive multimodal
forms of transit have been key factors in
giving it the most intense use of public trans-
port among the nation’s large cities. Montreal,
in contrast, had the lowest level of vehicle
ownership and logged the lowest annual pas-
senger kilometres among the seven large
cities in the sample, probably because the
metropolitan area also had the lowest house-
hold incomes.
Because density is such a major predictor of
non-automobile usage, and because density is
 MODALITIES OF THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS
so directly linked to proximity to the urban
core (Levinson and Kumar, 1997), there is a
strong expectation that the downtown and
inner city will prevail in metropolitan patterns
of non-motorised travel usage. Yet the authors
add that this should not lead to a passive
expectation that high densities alone will gen-
erate non-automobile commuting, for resi-
dents actively select neighbourhoods
Individuals choose a density (or distance
from the center) based in part on how
much they want to commute and the life-
style they wish to lead (Levinson and
Kumar, 1997, p. 169).
This observation brings us directly back to the
values of inner-city residents concerning
travel mode as part of a broader urban ideol-
ogy. Having established a theoretical frame-
work for understanding the transport
attitudes of gentrifiers, we can move now to
the empirical data and examine how these
ideologies are expressed in daily commuting
behaviour.
Commuting to Work: Correlating
Gentrification with the Mode of Travel
To establish the relationship between gentrifi-
cation and travel behaviours, we began with a
measurable definition of each of them.
Because gentrification is primarily an inner-
city process, the geographical scope of
research was limited to census tracts falling
within the administrative cities of Vancouver,
Toronto (1997 boundaries) and Montreal
(2001 boundaries).1 To maintain focus on
the inner city and consistency through time,
suburban areas incorporated into the cities of
Toronto and Montreal by municipal amalga-
mations in 1998 and 2002 were not included.
The location of census tracts where gentri-
fication had occurred was identified using a
method developed in earlier research (Ley,
1994, 1996). There, from a theoretical exam-
ination of the literature, two key indicators
of gentrifying households were employed:
possession of post-secondary education and
employment in the quaternary sector of pro-
fessionals, managers, administrators and
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2201
technical workers. Proportional values for
each of these indicators were derived from
the Census of Canada for census tracts in the
cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver
in 1971 and 2001. Following the earlier pre-
cedent, these values were added and then
divided by two to provide an index of social
status. Then, subtracting the 1971 index
from the 2001 index value established an
index of gentrification for every census tract,
representing an increase in social class
during the period.2 Tract values on this
1971/2001 index of gentrification were classi-
fied into quintiles and mapped. The location of
the peak land value on each map serves as a
proxy for the core of the central business dis-
trict, by far the leading employment node in
each city.
Maps of gentrification show some dissimi-
larities between the three cities. In Montreal
(Figure 1), gentrification has concentrated
around the downtown, notably in Little
Burgundy to the west and Old Montreal to
the south, as well as in Plateau Mont-Royal,
a formerly working-class and mixed ethnic
neighbourhood north-east of downtown,
made famous by artists and writers since the
1970s. Gentrification in Vancouver
(Figure 2) has appeared in various neighbour-
hoods in the downtown peninsula, including
Yaletown, to the south in Fairview and to
the south-west in Kitsilano, the city’s
counter-cultural neighbourhood in the 1960s.
In Toronto, however, the pattern is highly
diffuse (Figure 3). East of downtown lies the
district of early gentrification, Cabbagetown,
to the east again, the overflow area of
Riverdale and the lakefront district of The
Beach. Generally, gentrification west of
downtown came later and included the
Queen Street axis, the district west of
Spadina Avenue and the tracts adjacent to
High Park in the City’s west end. In the north-
ern sector, several dispersed nodes often com-
prise primarily condominium development in
the city’s historical axis of wealthy
neighbourhoods.
Measuring journey-to-work travel modes
was more straightforward. The 2001 Canadian
census included the question, “How did this
2202 MARTIN DANYLUK AND DAVID LEY

Figure 1. Gentrification index for Montreal, 1971–2001. Note: Area of study reflects city boundaries
before 2002 amalgamation.

person usually get to work?”. Permitted other method. For each census tract, the per-
responses included car, truck or van (as centage of the total employed labour force
driver or as passenger), public transit, using each mode of transport was calculated.
walking, bicycle, motorcycle, taxicab or Amalgamating the data to the city scale

Figure 2. Gentrification index for Vancouver, 1971–2001.

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 MODALITIES OF THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS 2203

Figure 3. Gentrification index for Toronto, 1971 –2001. Note: Area of study reflects city boundaries
before 1998 amalgamation.

reveals some marked intercity variations
(Table 1). Living among the lowest popu-
lation densities, City of Vancouver residents
were less than half as likely to ride public
transit to work as were commuters in Montreal
and Toronto, where well-developed multimo-
dal networks serve a range of routes and inner-
city destinations, and account for around 40
per cent of all journey-to-work trips. In con-
trast, public transit users in Vancouver rely
primarily on bus travel and a more limited
light-rail system. The 20 per cent difference
in transit ridership between Vancouver and
the other two cities has been transferred
largely to commutes by automobile;
Vancouver shows a significantly higher rate
of carpooling and a much higher rate of
driving to work, than either Montreal or
Toronto. While walking and cycling are min-
ority options in all three cities, they are slightly
more prominent in Vancouver, closely fol-
lowed by Toronto. Perhaps the city’s mild
winters and extensive system of cycle paths
have encouraged Vancouver cyclists.

Table 1. Percentage mode shares for the journey to work in the administrative cities of
Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver (2001)
Mode of transport Total Montreal Toronto Vancouver
Car, truck, van, as driver 45.5 44.3 37.7 57.7
Car, truck, van, as passenger 4.5 3.8 3.8 6.7
Public transit 34.0 38.2 41.0 17.1
Walked 11.9 10.5 13.0 13.0
Bicycle 3.0 2.3 3.2 4.2
Motorcycle 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.2
Taxicab 0.4 0.4 0.5 0.3
Other method 0.6 0.4 0.7 0.8

Note: Areas of study reflect city boundaries before 1998 (Toronto) and 2002 (Montreal) amalgamations.

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2204 MARTIN DANYLUK AND DAVID LEY
Table 2. Pearson correlation coefficients for gentrification index (1971–2001) against mode of travel to
work by percentage (2001)
Total
Mode of transport (n ¼ 485)a
Car, truck, van, as driver 20.25
Car, truck, van, as passenger 20.31
Public transit 20.14
Walked 0.38
Bicycle 0.43
Motorcycle 0.09
Taxicab 0.16
Other method 0.08
a
Number of census tracts.
Simple correlation between census tract
shares of different travel modes and indices
of gentrification adequately identified
the relationships of interest to us. Looking at
the full set of tracts in all three cities together
reveals an interesting profile, considering the
large combined sample size of 485 tracts
(Table 2). Overall, the journey-to-work
modes most clearly associated with gentrified
districts were cycling (r ¼ 0.43) and walking
(r ¼ 0.38). These are moderate but robust
positive correlations and confirm our theoreti-
cal expectations, based on both the transport
literature and consideration of the ideologies
of gentrifiers. So too, as expected, use of
automobiles, either as driver or passenger,
was negatively correlated with the index of
gentrification. Less expected, however,
was the negative sign against public transit
use. Although the correlation is low
(r ¼ 2 0.14), it challenges ideas of the
public household; one possible interpretation
is that transit fails to compete with cycling
and walking in gentrified tracts that are close
to central-city job locations.
Turning to the individual cities, we see
some variation in correlations. Despite
having by far the largest number of tracts in
the administrative city, the City of Montreal
had a well-defined set of correlations, reflect-
ing in part its compact map of gentrified tracts.
Overall, although Montreal had the lowest
median levels of cycling and walking among
the three cities, both cycling (r ¼ 0.57) and
walking (r ¼ 0.52) were disproportionately
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Montreal Toronto Vancouver
(n ¼ 283) (n ¼ 133) (n ¼ 69)
20.41 0.14 20.38
20.38 20.36 20.64
20.20 20.29 20.25
0.52 0.12 0.48
0.57 0.11 0.40
0.04 0.21 0.27
0.24 20.01 0.23
0.13 20.14 0.06
favoured in gentrified tracts; the average rate
of cycling to work among the top quintile of
gentrifying tracts reached 5.3 per cent—
while low, this figure is more than double
the city-wide average of 2.3 per cent. As
shown in Figure 4, bicycle usage is highest
in the Plateau Mont-Royal and downtown dis-
tricts, the same areas identified earlier as foci
of gentrification. Walking to work shows con-
siderable overlap with gentrification as well,
although walking extends to the western
margins of downtown where bicycle use is
lower. Journeys to work by automobile
showed significant negative correlations with
gentrification. These findings are consistent
with the theoretical knowledge presented
earlier, which locates rejection of the private
automobile and bodily connection with the
city as important facets of the ideology of gen-
trification. However, somewhat surprisingly,
gentrified districts in Montreal, like the other
cities, show disaffiliation from public
transport.
Relations between journey-to-work modes
and gentrification are very similar in the City
of Vancouver (Table 2). There are significant
positive associations with walking and
cycling, with walking (unlike Montreal)
showing the stronger relationship. Comparably
negative relationships exist with car use and a
slightly more negative association with rider-
ship of public transport. Overall, Vancouverites
are much less likely to be transit riders and
much more likely to drive to work, consistent
with the city’s lower population density and
 MODALITIES OF THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS
Figure 4. Bicycling to work in Montreal, 2001.
greater predilection in general to drive
(Kenworthy and Laube, 1999). Relationships
in the City of Toronto bring some surprises.
Despite a much higher level of car ownership
than Montreal (Kenworthy and Laube, 1999),
there is less driving to work and a greater ten-
dency to use transit, the modal choice of 41 per
cent of commuters. However, gentrification is
not strongly correlated with these trends
(Table 2). The relationships with cycling and
walking, although positive, are much lower
than in Montreal and Vancouver; indeed,
there is an equally low but unexpectedly
positive association with driving to work.
The correlation with transit use is negative
and the strongest of the three cities. Arguably,
the more dispersed map of gentrification that
includes distant districts like High Park, The
Beach and nodes in north Toronto makes
driving more attractive; certainly these areas
coincide with automobile use in the journey
to work (Figure 5). On the other hand, as in
the other cities, heightened walking and
cycling were confined to tighter bands
closer to downtown, with the map of walking
to work in Toronto biased to the west
of downtown (Figure 6), where residential
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2205
neighbourhoods are adjacent to the major
employers of the University of Toronto and
several large hospitals. So perhaps it is
because of the greater incidence of gentrifica-
tion in Toronto (Meligrana and Skaburskis,
2005), carrying the process to more dispersed
sites, that accounts for the irregularities in the
association with selected modes in the
journey to work.
The powerful nature of the relationship
between the distance to downtown and travel
behaviour is clear from the maps. It raises
the question of to what extent the selection
of travel mode is attributable, not just or
even primarily to gentrification, but instead
to population density and distance to down-
town. With densities highly correlated with
distance from downtown (Levinson and
Kumar, 1997), we computed correlations
between distance from the downtown peak
land value and mode of travel to work. As
expected, correlations between distance from
the downtown core and several modes of
transport were strong (Table 3). At the edge
of the administrative city, there was a strong
positive association with driving and a moder-
ate association with carpooling. Residents of
2206 MARTIN DANYLUK AND DAVID LEY

Figure 5. Driving to work in Toronto, 2001.

the in-town neighbourhoods, however, were
far more likely to walk to work; cycling and
taking a taxi were somewhat less bound by
the friction of distance. Use of public trans-
port, however, showed negligible relations
with distance from downtown. These findings
support other studies reporting the substantial
differences between urban and suburban
travel habits (Mustell Group, 2005; Schwanen
and Mokhtarian, 2005; Handy et al., 2006).

Figure 6. Walking to work in Toronto, 2001.

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 MODALITIES OF THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS 2207

Table 3. Pearson correlation coefficients for distance from city centre against mode of travel to work by
percentage (2001)
Total Montreal Toronto Vancouver
Mode of transport (n ¼ 485) (n ¼ 283) (n ¼ 133) (n ¼ 69)
Car, truck, van, as driver 0.64 0.78 0.74 0.73
Car, truck, van, as passenger 0.26 0.34 0.21 0.64
Public transit 20.08 20.21 0.02 0.05
Walked 20.63 20.63 20.72 20.76
Bicycle 20.40 20.42 20.37 20.30
Motorcycle 20.08 20.06 0.03 20.37
Taxicab 20.28 20.27 20.26 20.50
Other method 20.14 20.14 20.07 20.22

The strong influence of population density role in explaining travel patterns (Schwa-
and proximity to downtown upon the selection nen and Mokhtarian, 2005, p. 97).
of travel mode complicates any identification
At the same time, to control for the effects of
of the effects of gentrification. At least
distance would introduce a rigorous test of the
in Montreal and Vancouver, where gentrifica-
distinctive travel modalities of gentrified
tion is concentrated near the city centre, trans-
neighbourhoods, in all likelihood underesti-
port behaviours in upgrading neighbourhoods
mating the true effects. Table 4 presents
are likely to be influenced by the high densities
partial correlations between gentrification
of these areas and their proximity to a down-
and mode of travel to work, holding constant
town workplace. It becomes difficult in these
the effects of distance from the city centre.
cases to disaggregate the dual effects of the
That is to say, it reports whether gentrifying
built environment and individual choice. Of
census tracts show disproportionate usage
course, there is no need to isolate these two
rates for a particular mode of travel removing
variables—they are mutually entangled, since
the effect of distance from the city centre.
gentrifiers purposely choose an inner-city life-
With this control, significant changes occur
style and embrace the specific mobilities that
in travel mode relations in Montreal and
accompany it (Caulfield, 1994; Levinson and
Vancouver, where gentrification and proxi-
Kumar, 1997). Such evidence was clear from
mity to downtown are the most entangled. In
a San Francisco study
all three cities, the correlation with car usage
Regarding the interaction of residential becomes positive, albeit low, although least
location choice and commute behavior, so in Toronto. The association with transit
our results suggest that residential self- ridership becomes slightly more negative,
selection processes do play a significant especially in Montreal, while the relationship

Table 4. Partial correlation coefficients for gentrification index (1971–2001) against mode of travel to
work by percentage (2001), controlling for effects of distance from city centre
Mode of transport Total Montreal Toronto Vancouver
Car, truck, van, as driver 0.11 0.07 0.25 0.18
Car, truck, van, as passenger 20.21 20.24 20.36 20.40
Public transit 20.21 20.40 20.29 20.28
Walked 0.09 0.24 0.13 20.02
Bicycle 0.29 0.44 0.10 0.28
Motorcycle 0.06 0.01 0.21 0.04
Taxicab 0.03 0.10 20.02 20.14
Other method 0.01 0.07 20.15 20.12

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2208 MARTIN DANYLUK AND DAVID LEY
with walking, the most subject to the friction
of distance, almost disappears. Cycling,
although reduced in significance, remains the
travel mode with the strongest positive corre-
lation with gentrified census tracts (r ¼ 0.29).
So, in agreement with the literature that
specifies higher levels of education among
cyclists, commuters in gentrified districts
were more likely than their urban counterparts
to ride a bicycle to work regardless of proxi-
mity to downtown, and especially in Montreal
(r ¼ 0.44). In Montreal and Toronto, there
were also tendencies in these districts for the
journey to work to be taken on foot. A
second set of observations is more conten-
tious: gentrifiers in all three cities were less
likely to use public transit, less likely to ride
as passengers and slightly more likely to
drive than those in neighbouring districts.
This trend runs against conventional thinking
about sustainability and environmentalism
among the cultural and social professionals
in the city. It may reveal the statistical influ-
ence of more conservative urban professionals
in inner-city areas like Yaletown. These afflu-
ent gentrifiers can be seen as ascribing to a
more mainstream ideology that equates the
status and convenience of driving a fashion-
able car with a cosmopolitan lifestyle. Cer-
tainly, across the narrow water body of False
Creek from Yaletown and its Mini Cooper
showroom, in the designer condominiums of
the Fairview Slopes, Caroline Mills (1989,
p. 313) heard from a respondent that “down-
stairs in our parking garage there would be a
Lotus, a couple of Jaguars, a couple of
Mercedes”.
Conclusions
Our results show that residents of gentrified
areas are more likely than other commuters
to ride a bicycle to work, even when controls
are introduced to remove the effects of dis-
tance to the downtown core. At the same
time, they are less likely to be users of
public transport, despite their political
support for the notion of the public household.
This surprising disaffiliation may in part be
the result of transit’s inability to compete
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with cycling and walking for short to
medium-length trips. In addition, we see
that, as surveys suggest, gentrifiers buy into
the amenity package of inner-city neighbour-
hoods that greatly promotes walking and
cycling while discouraging driving. Because
of “the complicated relationships among resi-
dential location, commute behaviour and atti-
tudes towards land use and travel” (Schwanen
and Mokhtarian, 2005, p. 96), it is difficult to
separate out the independent effects of dis-
tance from downtown, population density
and the ideology of gentrifiers towards mode
preference in their journey to work. What
we can say is that in Montreal and Vancouver
walking and cycling are disproportionately
favoured in gentrified districts, while driving
and to a lesser extent, public transport are
not, whereas in Toronto, where gentrification
is much more dispersed throughout the city,
while public transport continues to be rela-
tively neglected, all other correlations are far
more muted and there is even a slight positive
tendency towards driving. The orientation
away from public transport is surprising in
light of the political ideology of gentrifers,
but consistent with their middle-class status.
In terms of public policy, these relationships
would endorse the recent development of
dedicated cycle routes in the central city and
suggest some caution in expanding public
transport in gentrified inner-city districts.
The very strong correlations between
walking and cycling to work and residential
proximity to downtown also encourage, for
environmental and public health reasons,
planning policy that seeks to minimise the
separation between home and place of
employment.
Relationships with travel mode are con-
fused by internal divisions within the popu-
lation of gentrifiers. Despite common
agreement on being ‘urban people’ and dis-
avowing a suburban way of life, there are
ideological differences between cohorts
associated with different stages in the gentrifi-
cation process. Support for progressive
candidates in municipal elections during the
1980s among the top quartile of gentrifying
census tracts varied widely, between 19 and
 MODALITIES OF THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS
69 per cent in Vancouver, and 18 and 82 per
cent in Toronto (Ley, 1996, p. 276). In
Toronto, the more progressive voters were
living close to downtown in older neighbour-
hoods with renovated properties and signifi-
cant clusters of social housing, the same
neighbourhoods where there was also an over-
representation of walking and cycling to work.
However, the more distant gentrified nodes,
High Park, The Beach and sections of North
Toronto, had both lower support for progress-
ive candidates and high levels of automobile
usage. Other areas of limited support for
left-liberal candidates coincided with
in-town condominium redevelopment, where
high prices attracted wealthier white-collar
workers. Doubtless the car-loving gentrifiers
of the Fairview Slopes and Yaletown in inner
Vancouver would fall within this stratum of
the new middle class. Further research,
ideally at the level of individual households,
might tease apart these relationships further.
Notes
1. To keep the population of census tracts rela-
tively uniform, a number of census tracts
were split into two or more smaller entities
by Statistics Canada during this period. In
cases where splitting had occurred, response
counts from two or more 2001 census tracts
were aggregated to recreate, as closely as
possible, the original 1971 unit. The com-
bined district was then treated as a single stat-
istical entity that could be compared to its
1971 counterpart.
2. A full rationale of this methodology appears
in Ley (1996, pp. 87 –89). The validity of
the social status index was demonstrated
there by its high correlation with other indi-
cators of socioeconomic status; the accuracy
of the gentrification index was ensured
through repeated field observation. Both
indices emerge as robust in a series of other
published studies examining such additional
topics as urban artists, religious disaffiliation,
electoral patterns and family types in the post-
industrial city.
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