This is a paid article which your subscription is allowing you to read.

The Common Sense has been investing more time and resources into deep-dive analyses of the forces shaping South African society and its economy. Our latest analysis turns to an important indicator of daily economic life: how South Africans commute to work.

The Common Sense analysed 16 years of commuter data from Statistics South Africa to provide a broad picture of how the daily travel patterns of South Africa’s working population reflect wider shifts in the country’s economic conditions. In South Africa, this is particularly revealing because the country effectively has two distinct commuter classes.

The first is the lower-income commuter class, made up largely of workers who depend on public transport, principally taxis, buses, and trains, or who walk to work. The second is the middle-class commuter, who is much more likely to drive a personal vehicle or, increasingly, to work from home.

The number of South Africans travelling to work has increased, but relatively slowly. Roughly 14 million people travelled to work in 2009, rising to around 19 million by 2025, equivalent to a compound annual growth rate of 2.2% a year.

(Compound annual growth rate shows how quickly something would have needed to grow each year, at a constant rate, to move from its starting value to its final value, with each year's growth building on the previous year's gains.)

To understand what sits behind that growth, it is useful to look at how South Africans get to work. The chart that follows breaks down commuters by their mode of travel for every year from 2009 to 2025. Lower income modes, including public transport and walking, appear in orange at the bottom of each bar, while middle-class modes, comprising personal vehicles and working from home, are layered above in green.

Over the past 16 years, South Africa’s two commuter classes remained in a stable balance. The middle-class commuter, driving to work or working from home, accounted for between 46% to 49% of commuters, while the lower-income commuter, relying on public transport, walking, or company transport, made up between 51% to 54%. That balance shifted in 2024 and 2025, when the middle-class commuter share fell to roughly 41% and the lower-income commuter share rose to around 59%.

The data show that South Africa is adding workers who walk or use taxis far faster than workers who drive, revealing both the collapse of state-run transport infrastructure and the slow expansion of the country's middle class.

The following chart shows the compound annual growth rate of the major commuting categories between 2009 and 2025.

Walking was the fastest-growing commuting category. For many lower-income workers, walking to work is not a lifestyle choice. Given the geography of South African cities, where poorer communities are often located far from major centres of economic activity, the increase reflects workers who cannot afford the transport necessary to reach their jobs.

Taxis were the second-fastest-growing commuting category. Although taxis are classified as public transport, they are overwhelmingly privately operated businesses providing transport to the public. As South Africa’s rail system deteriorated and bus commuting declined, the taxi industry expanded to fill the gap. In doing so, it has become one of the country’s most important and successful transport networks, moving millions of workers to and from their jobs every day, largely without the recognition its role in keeping the economy moving deserves.

At the other end of the commuter spectrum are personal vehicles and working from home, broadly reflecting the middle-class commuter.

Personal vehicle ownership and use are important indicators of middle-class expansion, making such sluggish growth over 16 years evidence of one of South Africa’s central economic failures: remarkably little upward mobility into the middle class.

Working from home was the third-fastest-growing category, but that headline figure hides a sharp break. The chart below shows its compound annual growth rate in the periods before and after Covid-19, revealing how much the pace picked up once the pandemic reshaped where people work.

This sudden acceleration reflects the lasting effect of Covid-19 on working patterns. But there may be another phenomenon at work. Parts of South Africa’s highly skilled professional class can increasingly participate in an economy that is not necessarily tied to the physical location of their employer. Software developers, engineers, consultants, and other skilled professionals can work from their homes for companies elsewhere in South Africa or abroad.

In that sense, working from home may increasingly represent an economic enclave, a relatively skilled section of the workforce able to escape both the daily commute and some of the geographical constraints facing the rest of the labour force.

The scale of these changes becomes even clearer when every commuting category is indexed to the same starting point. The chart below sets every commuter category equal to 100 in 2009. This removes the enormous differences in the absolute size of the categories and allows for comparison how quickly each has grown or contracted since then. A category reaching 150, for example, means that 50% more people use that mode than did in 2009. A category falling to 50 means that the number has halved.

The results reinforce the commuter themes identified above. South Africa is adding workers who walk or use taxis far faster than workers who drive, while a smaller skilled segment increasingly works from home, revealing the shocking collapse of state-run transport infrastructure, and the slow expansion of the country’s middle class.

The commuter data are ultimately a reflection of an economy that has been stagnant for well over a decade. Since 2009, South Africa has averaged economic growth of 1.1% a year, while fixed investment has fallen from above 20% of GDP to below 15% today over that same period. That investment rate matters because it is a key determinant of the economy’s future productive capacity and therefore its ability to create jobs, raise incomes, and move people into the middle class.

The consequence of this stagnation is a society that is increasingly fragmenting into enclaves. The commuter data provide a clear picture of what that means in practice.

Where the state retreats, private capacity takes its place. The taxi industry has expanded successfully into the vacuum left by failing state transport, while at the upper end of the economy, skilled South Africans increasingly have the means to work from home and insulate themselves from failing infrastructure. Yet the remarkably slow growth in driving suggests that relatively few South Africans are making the transition into this more prosperous middle class. At the other end are those without the resources to build alternatives around themselves, increasingly left behind to contend with a harsher economic reality in which, as the extraordinary rise in walking to work illustrates, even reaching a job is becoming more difficult.