The spread of telecommuting since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly changed urban transportation patterns in the US, according to a new study led by MIT researchers.
The study finds a significant difference between the effects of telecommuting on vehicle miles traveled and on mass transit ridership in the US
“A 1 percent reduction in field workers results in approximately a 1 percent reduction in [automobile] vehicle miles traveled, but a 2.3 percent decrease in mass transit ridership,” said Yunhan Zheng SM ’21, PhD ’24, an MIT postdoctoral fellow who co-authored the study.
“This is one of the first studies to identify the causal effect of telecommuting on vehicle miles traveled and transit traffic in the US,” adds Jinhua Zhao, an MIT professor and another co-author of the paper.
By accounting for the many nuances of the problem in the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia, as well as 217 metropolitan areas, the researchers believe they have reached a robust conclusion demonstrating the effects of working from home on larger mobility patterns.
The article, “Impact of Telecommuting on Vehicle Miles Traveled and Transit Travel in the US,” appears today in the journal Natural cities. The authors are Zheng, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT and a postdoctoral fellow at the Singapore Alliance for Research and Technology – MIT (SMART); Shenhao Wang PhD ’20, assistant professor at the University of Florida; Lun Liu, assistant professor at Peking University; Jim Aloisi, faculty member in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); and Zhao, professor of cities and transportation, founder of MIT’s Mobility Initiative, and director of MIT’s JTL Urban Mobility Laboratory and Transit Lab.
The researchers gathered data on the prevalence of telecommuting from multiple sources, including Google location data, travel data from the US Federal Highway Administration and the National Transit Database, as well as the US Monthly Survey of Work Conditions and Attitudes (conducted jointly by the Stanford University, University of Chicago, ITAM and MIT).
The study found significant differences between US states when it comes to how much the rise of telecommuting has affected mileage.
“The impact of a 1 percent change in telecommuting on reducing vehicle miles traveled in New York State is only about a quarter of that in Texas,” Zheng notes. “There’s a real variation there.”
At the same time, telecommuting has the biggest effect on mass transit revenue in places with widely used systems, with New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia making up the top five most affected metros.
The overall effect is surprisingly consistent over time, from early 2020 to late 2022.
“In terms of temporal variation, we found that the effect was fairly constant throughout our study period,” Zheng says. “This is not only important in the early stage of the pandemic, when remote work was a necessity for many. Scale remains constant in the later period when many people have the flexibility to choose where they want to work. We think this could have long-term implications.”
In addition, the study assesses the impact that the still greater number of remote workers may have on the environment and mass transit.
“At the national level, we estimate that a 10 percent reduction in the number of on-site workers compared to pre-pandemic levels would reduce total annual vehicle-related CO2 emissions by 191.8 million metric tons,” says Wang.
The study also projects that across the 217 metropolitan areas in the study, a 10 percent reduction in the number of field workers compared to pre-pandemic levels would result in an annual loss of 2.4 billion transit trips and $3.7 billion fare revenue – equal to approximately 27 percent of annual transit ridership and fare revenue in 2019.
“The significant impact of telecommuting on transit travel underscores the need for transit agencies to adapt their services accordingly, investing in services tailored to non-commuting travel and implementing more flexible schedules to better accommodate the new demand patterns,” says Zhao.
The research received support from the MIT Energy Initiative; Barr Foundation; The National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise programme; The 2023 University of Florida Research Opportunity Seed Fund; and the Beijing Social Science Foundation.
