How to Check Your Commute Time Before Renting or Moving

Most people check the rent, look at a few photos, maybe drive past the place. But the commute time? That usually gets a quick Google Maps search at whatever time you happen to be looking, which tells you almost nothing about what 8am Monday actually feels like.

If you're about to sign a 12 month lease, spending five minutes checking the commute properly can save you from a daily grind you didn't sign up for. The short version: set Google Maps to your actual departure time, check both directions, and compare transit vs driving for every listing you're serious about.

How to check commute time with Google Maps (most people skip this)

Google Maps is the obvious starting point and it's more capable than most people realise. You can set a specific departure time, choose between driving, transit, walking, or cycling, and get a full breakdown of each leg of the journey including walk segments, train or bus departures, transfer points, and estimated times for each.

The key thing most people skip: set the departure time to your actual commute time. A route that shows 25 minutes at 2pm on a Sunday might be 50 minutes at 8am on a Monday. Traffic patterns and transit schedules change dramatically between peak and off-peak.

A few things worth checking while you're there:

Set departure to your real morning commute time on a weekday, not "now"
Check both directions. The return trip at 6pm can look completely different
Compare transit and driving. Sometimes one is significantly better
Look at the route details. A "35 minute" commute that involves two transfers and a 15 minute walk from the station feels very different from a direct train

Other commute checking tools worth knowing

Citymapper is strong in the cities it covers. It shows real-time transit tracking, compares routes by speed, cost, and walking distance, and supports mixed-mode trips (bus to train to walk). It also shows disruptions and delays, which Google Maps doesn't always surface as clearly. Worth using if your city is supported.

Walk Score (walkscore.com) takes a different approach. Instead of routing, it gives any address a walkability score from 0 to 100, a transit score for public transport access, and a bike score. It won't tell you your exact commute time, but it's a quick way to gauge how car-dependent a location is before you dig into routes.

What makes this harder when you don't know the area

All of these tools work well when you already live in the city and you're choosing between a few suburbs. They get harder when you're moving interstate or from overseas and you're evaluating dozens of rental listings in places you've never been.

The issue isn't that the tools don't work. It's that doing this manually for every listing takes time. Open the listing, copy the address, open Google Maps, enter your work address, set departure time, read the breakdown, repeat. Across 10 or 20 listings, that's a lot of tab switching and a lot of chances to skip it and just hope for the best.

How PadNav handles this

PadNav was built specifically for this problem. You enter an address, hit evaluate, and get a full commute breakdown as part of a broader rental evaluation, all on one screen.

For commute data, it calculates travel time to every destination you've saved (your workplace, uni, gym, wherever you need to get to regularly). Each commute shows transit duration and driving duration, plus a step-by-step transit breakdown: walk to the station, which bus or train line, how many stops, where to transfer, and the walk from the final stop to your destination. There's a colour-coded journey bar that shows the proportion of walking vs bus vs train at a glance, so you can immediately tell if a "40 minute" commute is mostly sitting on a direct train or mostly walking and waiting for connections.

You can also pick a specific day and time (say, Monday at 8am) and recalculate, so you're seeing real peak-hour estimates rather than whatever time you happened to open the page.

But the commute is only part of it. The same evaluation also pulls in your NBN internet connection type and maximum speed, nearby amenities within walking distance (supermarkets, gyms, cafes, train stations, pharmacies, parks, and more, with walk time estimates for each), a street view image of the property, and an interactive map showing your commute route and amenity locations together.

The difference is that you do it once per listing instead of juggling five tabs. And because the commute sits next to NBN, amenities, and everything else, it's easier to compare rental listings side by side rather than trying to remember which place had the 40 minute commute and which one had the good internet.

Currently supports Australian addresses. Free to use at padnav.com.

Commute checklist before signing a lease

Before signing a lease, make sure you've actually checked:

Commute time set to your real departure time, not a random afternoon
Both directions (morning and evening can be very different)
Transit and driving, even if you think you'll only use one
What happens on weekends if that matters to you (different timetable, sometimes no service on certain lines)
The walk from the station or stop to your actual front door, not just "station to station"
Whether the route depends on a single connection. If you miss it, how long until the next one?