Telecommuting and other trips: an English case study

Abstract

This paper investigates the importance of non-work travel to the growing population of telecommuters and the implications of this for sustainable travel patterns. Previous research has identified a link between increased online access to work and reduced proximity between residential and workplace locations. These studies raise concerns that as more people split their work activities between home and external workplace, whilst living in more dispersed locations, more unsustainable transport impacts will be generated, including higher vehicle mileage, car dependency, and less physical activity. This paper counters that the implications of telecommuting and other flexible working practices for sustainable travel behaviours may be more dependent upon the number and type of non-work journeys and the accessibility of amenities for these purposes rather than on the distance to the workplace for less frequent commuting journeys. Using the National Travel Survey for England, the travel behaviours of those who identify themselves not as home workers but as working from home at least once a week are compared to other working adults by measuring and modelling the number and purpose of trips within a week's travel diary, independent of distance or mode. Telecommuters record fewer commute trips, more trips for other purposes, and the marginal utility of additional non-work trips to telecommuters is greater than for many other socio-economic characteristics. Thus, addressing the accessibility of non-work destinations proactively through local planning has the potential to optimise the sustainability benefits of telecommuting.

Introduction

Accessibility is a key concept within transport planning that is applied to quantify the level of time, cost, or distance penalties that permit or limit interactions between people, goods, activities, and opportunities dependent upon the transport systems and networks available (Reggiani et al., 2011). It is also dependent upon the spatial and temporal constraints or flexibilities attached to both individuals and opportunities (Miller, 2005; van Wee et al., 2013). Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) likewise provide access to activities, permit social interactions, and enable the purchase of goods, resulting in choices between travel and online access becoming ever more flexible, and even interchangeable (Lyons, 2015). The increasing access to work and work tasks at home on a regular or occasional basis via telecommuting is a primary example of this flexibility. Work is still an ‘anchor point’ for those in employment, a constraint requiring ‘non-discretionary’ commute trips within a concentrated timescale around which other daily travel is organised (Le Vine et al., 2017; Miller, 2005). Yet when people choose to telecommute regularly despite the presence of an external workplace or places, they are reducing, if not eliminating, the number of such journeys they need to make. This in turn affects the number, distance, and environmental impact of both the remaining commuting journeys and the total trips taken by the individual, household, or local population (Choo et al., 2005; Gubins et al., 2017; Zhu, 2013), and therefore the impact of telecommuting on sustainable mobility (Budnitz, 2018).

The concept of space-time geography helps to explain this phenomena, as telecommuting reduces the spatial and temporal constraints on an individual's availability to undertake activities at different locations within a given timeframe (Hägerstrand, 1970; Miller, 2005; Wang et al., 2018). Telecommuters have more control over where and when they perform work tasks, and, at the very least, the travel time they save on days when they telecommute can be spent working or performing other activities, making them more available to be in various locations during the working day. Indeed, research in China and the United States has concluded that telecommuters tend to make more trips for other purposes and that the demand for non-work activities may influence their choice to telecommute in the first place (Asgari and Jin, 2017; Loo and Wang, 2018; van Wee et al., 2013).

This paper builds on such literature by exploring the behavioural variation in out-of-home activity participation, in this case in England, by measuring and modelling the frequency of trips for different purposes by those who self-identify as regular telecommuters. It also considers the relative importance to travel behaviour patterns of the space-time flexibility enabled by telecommuting compared to other types of work flexibility and socio-demographic characteristics. The empirical analysis uses the National Travel Survey (NTS), which includes both a week's travel diary with records of all trips taken for different purposes during that week, plus an interview component for the same participants that includes a question on how frequently individuals work from home. Previous activity-based studies such as that using household survey data in New York by Asgari and Jin (2017) tend to measure only one or two journey purposes or categorise out-of-home and online activities into ‘mandatory’, ‘maintenance’, and ‘discretionary’. This methodology may enable an understanding of behavioural patterns, but offers little insight into the level of travel demand for different purposes, and thus the implications for accessibility and sustainability, so this study reviews 11 separate journey purposes.

Purpose is considered independently of distance or mode to better understand first whether individuals appear to have trip budgets as well as ‘travel time budgets’ (Mokhtarian and Chen, 2004), and secondly the implications of changing working patterns and distributions of non-work journeys for the provision of sustainable access from residential areas to the various land uses relevant to the 11 journey purposes. This reflection on land use and local amenities is topical in the English context, as recent policy has emphasised housing numbers over other planning matters including accessibility, which has in turn raised concerns about the sustainability of new development and long-term land use patterns (Averley et al., 2016; Transport for New Homes, 2018). Thus, our study aims to contribute to the debate by approaching the growing trend of telecommuting as an opportunity to investigate the relative frequency and importance of non-work journey purposes. This in turn might better inform policies on the integration of land use, transport and online accessibility, which are key determinants of the distance and impact of travel on sustainability.