There are three pieces of infrastructure North Coasters are very pleased with these days: the freeway extension, the railway extension, and Marmion Avenue. And of course the fourth, being Wanneroo Road.
If you’re thinking about moving north, the commute is the question, the one your friends ask with a raised eyebrow, the one you’ve already typed into a maps app at 11pm. So let’s just answer it.
The actual morning
From this stretch of coast, the CBD is about 45 minutes. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Marmion Avenue between 7:45 and 8:30am gets busy, but now that it’s double lanes, busy doesn’t mean stuck. The freeway entrance at Romeo Road puts you onto a stretch that rarely bunches up until around Burns Beach Road. From there you’re in the same traffic every northern-suburbs commuter has always been in; you’ve just started further up the map, with the ocean in your mirrors.
And if there’s ever drama on the freeway, Wanneroo Road running inland is the get-out-of-jail-free card. Every North Coaster learns the rule early: if in doubt, head east, then south.
Once or twice, that rule has earned its keep. One morning around 7:30 a crash near the Whitfords exit clogged the freeway solid. I was already on it, watching the electronic signage light up, and peeled off at Neerabup to Wanneroo Road while everyone else pushed on toward Marmion and the coast. Fifteen minutes later I was moving again. It happens maybe once in a blue moon, and every time, the inland road is right there waiting.
Train stations changed things
For years, “the drive” was the whole conversation, because the drive was the only option. Not anymore. The Metronet stations at Alkimos, Eglinton and Yanchep opened up a different kind of commute entirely — park, sit down, and let someone else deal with Burns Beach Road. If your work is CBD nine-to-five, the train quietly removes most of the argument against living here. These stations weren’t built for the suburb that exists today; they were built for the population coming over the next few decades, and it shows.
Weekend twist
I’ll admit something. There are times I just don’t feel like travelling to the city, but it’s almost never on a workday. It’s the weekends. The CBD is only 45 minutes away, yet on a Saturday it feels further than I want to go.
And it took me a while to realise that’s not a bug. It’s the feature.
That mild reluctance keeps your weekends here, on the coast, at the lagoon, at the local. Your money stays local too. Shopping was solved long ago: Joondalup is twenty minutes with everything you’d ever need, and the rapid rise of retail up here means the “you have to drive for everything” era is over. The city becomes something you visit on purpose, not somewhere you’re dragged by errands.
Add to that the fastest-growing part of the equation: local jobs. As the coast grows, so does the work, and every year more North Coasters commute fifteen minutes instead of forty-five, or from the home office with the windows open to an ocean breeze. The honest long-term answer to “but the drive?” may simply be: which drive?
The exit
But here’s the real reason the commute has never bothered me the way people assume it must.
However the day went, there’s a moment on the way home, coming off at Romeo Road, the light changing, the ocean somewhere ahead, where the city lets go of you. Every single time.
Breathe out. Relax. You’re home.