The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly increased the share of employees who work full or part-time from home — and the effects continue as many employers cut back on costs. Pajama workers found that this minimized travel and clothing costs and was more comfortable.
Yet while telecommuting could cut hundreds of millions of tons of carbon emissions from car travel, it would also result in a huge loss of revenue for buses, subways, trains and other public transport companies, according to a new US-China study. study.
Using the latest data on telecommuting and transportation behavior since the pandemic upended working conditions, researchers from the University of Florida, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Peking University have revealed how cities can achieve their sustainability goals by encouraging telecommuting. They published their findings in the journal Natural cities under the title “Impact of Telecommuting on Vehicle Miles Traveled and Transit Travel in the United States.”
The researchers found that a 10 percent increase in telecommuters could lead to a 10 percent drop in carbon emissions from the transportation sector — or nearly 200 million tons of carbon dioxide per year in the U.S. alone, thanks to fewer car trips. However, the same portion of telecommuting would reduce transit fare revenue by $3.7 billion nationally, a whopping 27% drop.
They now work exclusively from home, but up to half of all workers may telecommute at least some of the time.
Impact of telecommuting on transit
“Transit agencies should be very concerned,” said University of Florida urban planning professor Shenhao Wang, who led the new study. “Yet overall we would expect less energy use from reduced car travel – so the picture is very complex and whether the effects are positive or negative depends on the stakeholders.”
Urban planners have long viewed telecommuting as a way to reduce congestion and carbon emissions. But before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was challenging to analyze the effects of telecommuting because few employees worked from home. The pandemic’s rapid growth and continued investment in telecommuting have finally allowed researchers to see how the trend affects urban mobility.
The new study covers the period from April 2020 to October 2022. It includes data from Google on telecommuting patterns, along with information from the US Federal Highway Administration on car travel and a national transit database. The researchers linked transportation behavior to the rise and fall of telecommuting in different states and metropolitan areas to reveal the effect of increased telecommuting on car travel and public transportation.
They found that public transit trips declined more than twice as fast as car trips in response to the same decline in field workers.
“People mostly rely on transit to get to work. When people start working from home, their need to commute is greatly reduced. So much of the transit was no longer needed,” said MIT postdoctoral researcher Yunhan Zheng, lead author of the new paper. “On the other hand, many people rely on vehicles for trips other than going to work. They go to the market, to restaurants and to recreational activities. These activities may not necessarily disappear when people work from home.
Because of these differences between driving and transit behavior, “this can present a challenge for transit agencies in terms of their financial sustainability, so they may need to take some action to address this. For example, they could provide more services during off-peak hours in residential areas to better serve remote workers,” said Zheng, who also added that they will continue to analyze the effects of telecommuting on urban mobility when new data emerges and employment trends are moving away from the immediate effects of the pandemic.
