SURREY (NEWS1130) – When you’re stuck in traffic on your way to work in the morning, do you ever wonder where all of those people going the other way are heading?

A lot of them are what city planners call ‘reverse commuters,’ and it appears there are more of them on the roads each year.

“I live just off of Main Street, and I work in Surrey right by Guildford Mall at Coast Capital Savings,” says Carly Nicol, who has been a reverse commuter for about five months. “I work typical nine to five hours and on a good day [the trip] takes me about 45 minutes and on a bad day it takes me an hour or more.”

She says the trip is much easier than her old commute from her last home in Port Coquitlam to her last job in downtown Vancouver.

“When I lived in Poco, I would take the SkyTrain, switch trains at Commercial Drive and then get on another train to get downtown and that trip was definitely more than hour,” Nicol says. “I would also take the West Coast Express, which was way better, but it was still at least an hour door-to-door.”

Jamila Kamrudin, who lives in south Vancouver and drives to her job in Newton five days a week during rush hour, never planned on being a reverse commuter. It just happened.

“I have lived in Vancouver all of my life,” Kamrudin says. “I was completing my practicum where I work currently, and I was hired on so I continued working in Surrey.”

On a good day, she can make it door-to-door in half an hour.

Neither Nicol or Kamrudin plan on moving to Surrey anytime soon.

According to the 2006 Census, the number of people in Vancouver who commute to work in other cities is between 30 and 40 per cent.

Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts believes that number has grown since.

“The trends have been shifting for quite sometime,” Watts says. “We know that about 70 per cent of future growth will be south of the Fraser. You have the expansion of Delta Port and the expansion of Fraser Surrey docks, so there are a lot of elements here that we have to be paying attention to to make sure infrastructure is being planned and is moving forward.”

TransLink compiled some data in 2008 that suggests 81 per cent of car trips in Surrey don’t leave the city.

The difference is the Census figures deal specifically with people who are commuting to work and the TransLink numbers look at everything from trips to the grocery store to people who are going to school.

Watts says even though the numbers can’t be compared directly, it’s clear more people are coming into her city and staying there.