Random Access

In an ideal world everyone would live ten minutes away from work — saving time, energy, costs, and stress.
Needless to say we in the GTA do not live in an ideal world, as thousands of commuters probably think about daily as they sit on the QEW between Hurontario St. and Cawthra Rd. or on Highway 403 where it "bunches up" — to use a favourite phrase of traffic spotters — around Mavis Rd. and Hurontario St., or in any one of another 10 familiar bottlenecks you care to name.
There are people trying to do something productive about the problem, however, other than making speeches and drawing lines on the pavement for HOV lanes.
One of them is Strac Ivanov, a Toronto resident who has just launched a new web site for Peel Region residents at http://peel.vicinityjobs.com.
His idea is incredibly simple, as most good ideas are.
He has created a job search site on the net that will allow people who live in Mississauga and Peel to search for jobs in their own communities.
"It's a business.... but it's more like a non-profit organization at this point," says the 31-year-old who has three other similar sites including the first successful one he started in York Region, which just happens to bear a lot of demographic similarities to Peel.
When he was getting his MBA at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration before he came to Canada, Ivanov built the technology behind the search engines that is now being used to cull information from numerous websites to put together a Peel-centric job board. His thesis was on "regional and topical classification of information from newspapers and magazines."
The concept sat on the back burner for several years until Ivanov moved to Canada got thinking about "what a serious problem commuting is."
When he began seeing how some job recruiting agencies use the Internet and giant search engines to their advantage, the idea of Vicinity Jobs came to him.
"Most employers look for people on a national basis, so they can get as many applicants as they can," he points out. In many cases, there are suitable candidates right under their noses — but there was no ready forum to get them together.
Ivanov and his wife and others involved have full-time jobs and run the service on a break-even basis as a sideline at the moment, with no charge to employers or job seekers. Revenues come from ads on the site and some premium charges for things like posting a company logo on a site. They also make money through related activities, such as providing reports on the local job market to clients such as the Region of York, who have a significant interest in keeping track of such trends.
Although it is hoped the service will become more than just self-sustaining in future, Ivanov says he gets real pleasure from knowing that he is helping to curb commuting, which has few benefits unless you are a major oil company.
"I am happy to see this technology that I built being put to use in a helpful way that actually benefits people," he says simply.
Instead of wasting our natural resources fuming in their cars, parents can get home early, have more time and energy for themselves and their children, get some exercise or devote their newfound time to volunteering for a good local cause.
"If you are commuting less," says Ivanov, "It benefits not just you, but everybody — your whole community."
To paraphrase an old phrase from the 50s: The only good commute is a dead commute.