Project Summary
Teleworking, also known as ‘working from home’, is increasingly becoming a common work arrangement due to the wide penetration of telecommunications and information technologies in the job sector. Due to the current outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent travel restrictions, teleworking has turned out to be more important than ever. Telework is an effective tool to achieve planning and policy objectives of travel demand management and environmental management such as reducing travel and greenhouse gas emissions. However, the empirical evidence of the impacts of teleworking in the reduction of vehicle miles-traveled and associated environmental impacts remains inconclusive. Thus, our research goal is to refine the relationship between telework and travel with a particular focus on California. We will perform the following three tasks: (1) analyze the intra-household interactions in activity-travel participation between teleworkers and other household members; (2) compare travel and associated VMT between teleworker and commuter households; and (3) investigate the potential impacts of telework on household travel in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas. Two large data sources, the 2017 National Household Travel Survey collected for California (NHTS-CA add-on) the EPA Smart Location dataset will be used to conduct the planned analysis. This research is expected to provide important insights on the efficacy of telework as an effective travel demand management strategy as well as an environmental management tool.