Are telecommuting and personal travel complements or substitutes?

Whether telecommuting and personal travel are complements or substitutes is a key question in urban policy analysis. Urban planners and policy makers have been proposing telecommuting as part of travel demand management (TDM) programs to reduce congestion. Based on small samples, several empirical s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Annals of regional science 2012-04, Vol.48 (2), p.619-639
Main Author: Zhu, Pengyu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Commuting
Complement
Counties
Data analysis
Economics
Economics and Finance
Empirical analysis
Employees
Employment
Environmental Economics
Geography
Government agencies
Households
Incentive plans
Landscape/Regional and Urban Planning
Literature reviews
Local government
Management
Microeconomics
Panel data
Planners
Policies
Policy analysis
Regional/Spatial Science
Science policy
Social sciences
Special Issue Paper
State government
Studies
Survey data
Surveys
Telecommuting
Telework
Teleworking
Transportation planning
Travel
Travel patterns
Urban planning
Urban policy
Work-life balance
Workers
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Summary:Whether telecommuting and personal travel are complements or substitutes is a key question in urban policy analysis. Urban planners and policy makers have been proposing telecommuting as part of travel demand management (TDM) programs to reduce congestion. Based on small samples, several empirical studies have found that telecommuting has a substitution effect (although small) on commute travel, and have thus argued that policies promoting telecommuting might be promising in reducing travel. Using data from the 2001 and 2009 National Household Travel Surveys (NHTS), this study involves two large national samples to try to more accurately identify the impact of telecommuting on workers’ travel patterns. Through a series of empirical tests, this research investigates how telecommuting influences workers’ one-way commute trips, daily total work trips, and daily non-work trips, and tries to provide some answers to a question that has been discussed for some years—namely, whether telecommuting and personal travel are complements or substitutes. The results of these tests suggest that telecommuting has been an important factor in shaping personal travel patterns over the 2001–2009 period, and that telecommuting indeed has a complementary effect on not just workers’ one-way commute trips, but also their daily total work trips, and total non-work trips.
ISSN:0570-1864
1432-0592
DOI:10.1007/s00168-011-0460-6