Does telecommuting reduce trip-making? Evidence from a U.S. panel during the COVID-19 pandemic

Telecommuting has risen to unprecedented levels in the past three years and remains one of the most disrupted aspects of transportation behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, the authors investigate the transport impacts of telecommuting. The authors use a combination of passively collected Point of Interest (POI) data between January 2020 and December 2021 and five waves of actively collected surveys on a panel of participants to quantify the effects of changes in the frequency of telecommuting on the total number of daily and weekly trips that a telecommuter makes, as well as their total daily and weekly distance traveled. The authors overcome important limitations of related work in the literature by controlling for unobserved confounders using fixed-effect and first-difference regressions. Doing so, the authors find evidence that telecommuting results in the generation of new non-commute trips that offset a significant portion of the reduction in commute trips. The authors show that telecommuters make an average of roughly one additional non-commute trip on telecommute days relative to commute days. The additional trip is on average shorter than the commute trip, as the authors find that the total distance traveled on telecommute days is significantly shorter than on commute days for employees in their panel. At the weekly level, the authors also find that one additional day of telecommuting results in one additional non-commute trip. This suggests that the additional non-commute trip on telecommuting days is a newly generated trip, rather than a trip substituted from other days of the week. The weekly analysis also confirms that the non-commute trip is on average shorter than the two-way commute trips, as the total weekly distance traveled by workers in the authors' sample decreases by about 15 km for every day of telecommuting. The authors' results suggest that the trip reduction effects of telecommuting could be overestimated if telecommuting-induced new trip generation is not properly accounted for.

• Record URL:
  • https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2024.103972
• Record URL:
  • http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096585642400020X
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/09658564
• Supplemental Notes:
  • © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Abstract reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Obeid, Hassan
  • Anderson, Michael L
  • 0000-0002-4079-1965
  • Bouzaghrane, Mohamed Amine
  • Walker, Joan
• Publication Date: 2024-2

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Figures; References;
• Pagination: 103972
• Serial:
  • Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice
  • Volume: 180
  • Issue Number: 0
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 0965-8564
  • Serial URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09658564

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: COVID-19; Telecommuting; Trip generation; Trip purpose
• Geographic Terms: United States
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Security and Emergencies;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01911758
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Mar 13 2024 9:22AM