Time geography of daily activities: A closer look into telecommute impacts

As part of a series of work examining the actual impacts of telecommuting on workers’ mobility and activity scheduling, this paper focuses on how telecommuting might ease the temporal/spatial constraints of work activities and affect the time-space distribution of daily activities. In the first step, telecommuting was analyzed from an opportunity-based perspective built upon stochastic frontier models and time-space prisms. Results showed that telecommuters had larger prisms compared to non-telecommuters, indicating higher levels of accessibility to out-of-home activity opportunities. The effects on regular telecommuters were much more sensible than non-regular telecommuters, which may indicate that they were able to take advantage of the opportunities brought by telecommuting, if it is adopted on a regular basis. In the second step, temporal/spatial distribution of non-mandatory trips/activities were compared among telecommuters and non-telecommuters. Accordingly, despite the relaxation of work-related constraints, minimal impacts were observed on telecommuters’ time-of-day and spatial distribution of non-mandatory activities. In terms of temporal distribution, while differences were observed in timing of certain non-mandatory activities, they were not large enough to exceed time-of-day boundaries. In view of spatial distribution, people tended to keep non-mandatory activities within certain distance from home with or without telecommuting, although telecommuting seemed to relax the spatial constraints associated with work locations. The data for this research work came from the 2010–2011 Regional Household Travel Survey conducted in the New York metropolitan area.

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  • English

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  • Accession Number: 01712718
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Files: TRIS
  • Created Date: Jul 29 2019 11:02AM