How d'ya get there?

As well as details of whether people work or not the Census collects details of where people work and how they travel to work.  This is mainly used by planners etc in the big cities to work out public transport schedules and some aspects of road planning.

Before getting to the local results I was always interested in the relationship between size of a City and use of cars for the commute.
The actual data available from the ABS is amazingly detailed with some 230 combinations of modes available.  There are of course some 'special'modes such as ferries in Sydney (0.36% of commutes) and trams in Melbourne (2.71%) and Adelaide (0.53%).

There are no ferries on the Molonglo and trams , trains and even buses are few on Captains Flat Road.  So the commute in this area is dominated by the car.
I assume that most of those who walked to work were folk employed on properties, as would be some of those who worked at home.  (In view of the rural nature of the area I'm a little disappointed that there isn't an entry for "tractor" or "horse"!)

The Census data also includes information about where people travel to work.  As the information is mainly used by planners with access to heavy-duty computing systems the variable concerned is only available at quite a detailed level which generated a table with 687 entries including 134 regions - mainly suburbs - in the ACT and 553 special regions for NSW.  Only 44 of these were work destinations for people in the Gazette area.  I recoded them to ad-hoc areas as shown in the following chart.
I've shown these as red X's on a map, with the size of the X roughly equivalent to the number of travellers.
The entry for the Queanbeyan zone covers several detailed entries.

I have been unable to find a definition of the 'Queanbeyan Region' but assume the major components of the area include:
  • People who work at home;
  • Workplaces in Bungendore;
  • HQJOC (although very few people in this destination are employed in the Public Administration and Security Industry)
  • Work on rural properties in the QPRC area.
There is a separate entry in the table for Braidwood but no-one from the Gazette area confessed to working there!

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