A
commuter town is an urban community that is primarily residential, from which most of the
workforce commute out to earn their livelihood. Many commuter towns act as
suburbs of a nearby
metropolis that workers travel to daily, and many suburbs are commuter towns. Commuter towns belong to the
metropolitan area of a city, and a ring of commuter towns around an urban area is known as a
commuter belt.
A commuter town may also be known as a bedroom community or "bedroom suburb" (Canada and U.S. usage), a dormitory town (UK Commonwealth and Ireland usage), or less commonly a dormitory village (UK Commonwealth and Ireland). These terms suggest that residents sleep in these neighborhoods, but mostly work elsewhere; they further suggest that these communities have little commercial or industrial activity beyond a small amount of retail, oriented toward serving the residents.
As a general rule, suburbs are developed in areas adjacent to main employment centres, such as a town or a city, but may or may not have many jobs locally, whereas bedroom communities have few local businesses and most residents who have jobs commute to employment centers some distance away. Commuter towns may be in rural or semi-rural areas, with a ring of green space separating them from the larger city or town. Where urban sprawl and conurbation have erased clear lines among towns and cities in large metropolitan areas, this is not the case.
Commuter towns can arise for a number of different reasons. Sometimes, as in Sleepy Hollow, New York or Tiburon, California, a town loses its main source of employment, leaving its residents to seek work elsewhere. In other cases, a pleasant small town over time attracts more residents but not large businesses to employ them, requiring them to commute to employment centers. Another cause, particularly relevant in the American South and West, is the rapid growth of once-small cities. Owing largely to the earlier creation of the Interstate Highway System; the greatest growth was seen by the sprawling metropolitan areas of these cities. As a result many small cities were absorbed into the suburbs of these larger cities.
