Suburbanisation,Employment Change,and Commuting in the Tallinn Metropolitan Area

The author's aim is to analyse the role of suburbanisation and employment change in commuting in the Tallinn metropolitan area, Estonia. The author analyses changes in commuting compared with the late Soviet period, and clarifies the compositional differences between commuters and noncommuters. Data analysis is based on anonymous, individual, 2000 Census records, and bivariate and multivariate methods are employed. The major conclusions are that the commuting field of Tallinn enlarged and the intensity of commuting from the suburbs to Tallinn increased in the 1990s. Commuters differ from noncommuters both in Tallinn and in the suburbs in regard to most of the social, demographic, and housing variables studied. People who suburbanised in the 1990s were more likely to be commuters than were people who already lived in the suburbs at the end of the Soviet period; high-unemployment areas did not send more commuters to Tallinn than did low-unemployment areas.