Telecommuting Suitability Modeling: An Approach Based on the Concept of Abstract job

A new approach to modeling telecommuting suitability is proposed in this paper. The approach, based on the concept of abstract job, can be employed to assess the level of suitability for telecommuting of the bundle of tasks comprising a job. By abstract job is meant a way of considering jobs on the basis of their elements and tasks, representing the general structure of the job. In this study, the basic tasks a job is composed of, pertaining to telecommuting suitability, are identified. To show the applicability of the approach, discrete choice models are calibrated, based on a sample of 245 employees in Tehran, Iran, indicating that from among the 6 tasks identified, 5 tasks are significantly associated with the level of telecommuting suitability.     

Interpreting employee telecommuting adoption: An economics perspective

Travel demand is derived from activities at the trip destination; therefore, media that have the potential to provide services previously only supported by transportation will have a chance to be chosen by passengers. The idea of telecommuting is considered the most promising substitute of work trips and thus a good strategy of transportation demand management. From a microeconomics perspective, demand for goods or services can be interpreted as a function of prices and generalized income. Therefore, telecommuting adoption is viewed as a trade-off among the prices of telecommuting itself, substitutes, and complements, as well as generalized income and situational constrains incurred by the employee. The underlying rationale is interpreted by elasticity analysis of aggregate telecommuting demand, based on an adoption model, with respect to various decision variable. The results indicate that the elasticity with respect to the price that the employee may incur in order to telecommute is the largest one, and the elasticity with respect to the living space at home is the second one. Additionally, all of the elasticities found in the group of employees currently commuting by private transportation are greater than the corresponding ones found in the group of transit riders. These findings are expected to have significant implications of transportation policies. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Telecommuting and travel: state of the practice,state of the art

This paper provides an overview of the status of telecommuting in the United States, especially as it relates to changes in travel behavior. Regarding the state of the practice, the paper discusses some refinements to the definition of telecommuting that have developed through increased operational experience. It reports several policy statements involving telecommuting, and explores the appeal of telecommuting as a public policy instrument. It highlights some trends in the implementation of home-based and work center-based telecommuting, and suggests that visible public-sector involvement has been crucial to the increased activity in this area.In sketching the state of the art, the paper outlines some frequently-stated hypotheses on telecommuting and travel behavior, and summarizes current empirical findings relating to those hypotheses. Finally, it suggests a variety of topics suitable for further research. These include studying factors influencing the ultimate adoption levels of telecommuting; impacts on energy/air quality, mode choice, and location/urban form; interactions with other transportation demand management strategies; relationships to the traditional urban travel demand forecasting process; cost/benefit tradeoffs; and telecommuting centers.     

Impact of telecommuting and intelligent transportation systems on residential location choice

The impacts of telecommuting and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) on urban development patterns were investigated in terms of households' residential location choice decisions. A discrete choice modelling approach framework was used. A stated preference (SP) logit analysis was carried out to estimate the parameters of the utility function. An attitude survey of employees of selected public and private sector organizations in the Ottawa-Carleton Region (Canada) yielded the required data for model estimation. In addition to obtaining background information, the survey elicited SP responses by presenting a number of hypothetical residential choice scenarios defined according to the principles of SP experimental design. Results show that telecommuting and ITS measures are highly significant factors in the residential choice model. This leads to the conclusion that these reinforce dispersed residential patterns and encourage moves towards outlying sites. Implications of this conclusion for urban land development planning are noted.     

The influence of employer ridesharing programs on employee mode choice

Employer ridesharing programs and employee mode choice were analyzed using Southern California data. Problems in estimating the costs and benefits of employer ridesharing programs were identified. Surveyed firms used a wide variety of information to estimate employee mode split internally. Virtually all surveyed firms offered free or subsidized parking to some or all of their employees. Few responding firms estimated the cost of providing employee parking accurately, if at all. Despite these significant data limitations, factors influencing firm choice of employer ridesharing program components were identified. The influence of employer ridesharing programs on employee mode choice was modeled using weighted least squares logit regression analysis. Firm size was foung to be the single most important variable identified in the analysis. Larger firms were more likely to offer ridesharing incentives to their empolyees, and to report direct employer benefits from ridesharing. Alternative work hours hindered the formation of ridesharing arrangements in some cases. Relatively few firms promoted ridesharing on a purely voluntary basis. A private market for employer ridesharing services was found to exist, however. Personalized matching assistance may be a critical factor in developing more effective employer ridesharing programs. Parking pricing and supply control measures probably would have a larger impact on employee mode split overall. Parking management faces severe obstacles in implementation, some of which might be overcome through the more extensive provision of ridesharing services, such as personalized matching assistance. to employees at specific employment sites by their employers.     

On modeling telecommuting behavior: option, choice, and frequency

The current study contributes to the already substantial scholarly literature on telecommuting by estimating a joint model of three dimensions—option, choice and frequency of telecommuting. In doing so, we focus on workers who are not self-employed workers and who have a primary work place that is outside their homes. The unique methodological features of this study include the use of a general and flexible generalized hurdle count model to analyze the precise count of telecommuting days per month, and the formulation and estimation of a model system that embeds the count model within a larger multivariate choice framework. The unique substantive aspects of this study include the consideration of the “option to telecommute” dimension and the consideration of a host of residential neighborhood built environment variables. The 2009 NHTS data is used for the analysis, and allows us to develop a current perspective of the process driving telecommuting decisions. This data set is supplemented with a built environment data base to capture the effects of demographic, work-related, and built environment measures on the telecommuting-related dimensions. In addition to providing important insights for policy analysis, the results in this paper indicate that ignoring the “option” dimension of telecommuting can, and generally will, lead to incorrect conclusions regarding the behavioral processes governing telecommuting decisions. The empirical results have implications for transportation planning analysis as well as for the worker recruitment/retention and productivity literature.     

Commuting-related fringe benefits in the Netherlands: Interrelationships and company,employee and location characteristics

Mobility management measures taken by firms could potentially result in more sustainable transport choices and hence reduce traffic congestion and emissions. Fringe benefits offered to employees are a means to implement those measures. This paper explores the most common commuting-related fringe benefits currently provided by employers in the Netherlands, namely telework, flextime and allowance types like public transport passes, bicycle contribution, company cars and general financial compensation. By using the Dutch National Time Use Survey (TBO) 2005/2006, interrelationships among fringe benefits and correlations between company, employee, and (home and work) location characteristics and those employee benefits could be investigated. Logistic regressions and Tobit models are used for several estimations indicating the provision and the use of fringe benefits. The results show that relationships among fringe benefits exist, mainly between telework and flextime, but also between those flexible work arrangements and some types of commuting allowance. Furthermore, numerous job, person and geographical variables affect the probability of receiving and using the fringe benefits. For example, in the non-profit and the public sector sustainable commuting benefits are more often provided, the use of fringe benefits is strongly influenced by household composition and several allowance types show a significant correlation with the number of cars in the household. Moreover, firm location, in particular firm density, is highly related to mobility management measures taken by firms.     

Parking subsidies and travel choices: Assessing the evidence

This article reviews empirical studies of how employer-paid parking affects employees' travel choices. A strong effect is found: parking subsidies greatly increase solo driving. When employers reduce or remove parking subsidies, a significant number of solo drivers shift to carpools and/or transit. This conclusion is based on studies of parking subsidies in a variety of circumstances, including central city and suburban areas, private and public employers, and clerical and professional employees. Three measures are developed to compare changes in commute patterns: changes in the share of solo drivers. changes in the number of autos driven to work per 100 employees, and the parking price elasticity of demand for solo driving. The studies reviewed here show that 19 to 81 percent fewer employees drive to work alone when they pay for their own parking. Because 90 percent of American commuters who drive to work receive employer-paid parking, these findings are significant for designing transportation policies to reduce air pollution, traffic congestion, and energy consumption.     

Telecommuting and environmental policy: Lessons from the ecommute program

In 1999 the National Air Quality and Telecommuting Act established pilot telecommuting programs (ecommute) in five major US metropolitan areas. The major goal of the ecommute program was to examine whether a particular type of economic incentive, tradable emissions credits from telecommuting, represents a viable strategy for reducing vehicle miles traveled and improving air quality. A context is established for evaluating whether the envisioned trading scheme represents a feasible approach to reducing mobile source emissions and promoting telecommuting and a review of the limited experience with mobile source emissions trading programs is provided. Using two-and-one-half years of data collected in the ecommute program, telecommuting frequency, mode choice, and emissions reductions are examined. It is found that from a regulatory perspective, the most substantial drawback to such a program is its questionable environmental integrity, resulting from difficulties in designing sufficiently rigorous quantification protocols to accurately measure the emissions reductions from telecommuting. Such a program is not likely to be cost-effective because the emissions reductions from a single telecommuter are very small.     

Telecommuting and urban sprawl

This study examines what happens to city size when telecommuting occurs. It assumes that more telecommuting occurs when telecommuters’ labor cost share increases and/or workers adopt a more favorable attitude toward working from home. The study shows that telecommuting produces opposing forces that regulate the city size, one centralizing and the other decentralizing urban activities. These forces are examined in a city where workers and firms are given the option to freely mix working at the office and at home, and the city’s land use is endogenously determined. A rise in the productivity of an economy due to telecommunications technology could work to centralize urban activities, while urban contraction can occur with a fixed city population.     

Metropolitan size and the impacts of telecommuting on personal travel

Telecommuting has been proposed by policy makers as a strategy to reduce travel and emissions. In studying the metropolitan size impact of telecommuting on personal travel, this paper addresses two questions: (1) whether telecommuting is consistently a substitute or complement to travel across different MSA sizes; and (2) whether the impact of telecommuting is higher in larger MSAs where telecommuting programs and policies have been more widely adopted. Data from the 2001 and 2009 National Household Travel Surveys are used. Through a series of tests that address two possible empirical biases, we find that telecommuting consistently had a complementary effect on one-way commute trips, daily total work trips and daily total non-work trips across different MSA sizes in both 2001 and 2009. The findings suggest that policies that promote telecommuting may indeed increase, rather than decrease, people’s travel demand, regardless of the size of the MSA. This seems to contradict what telecommuting policies are designed for. In addition, model results show that the complementary impact of telecommuting on daily travel is lower in larger MSAs, in terms of both daily total work trips and daily total non-work trips.     

Modeling employees' perceptions and proportional preferences of work locations: the regular workplace and telecommuting alternatives

This paper develops measures of job and workplace perceptions, and examines the importance of those and other measures to the desired proportions of work time at each of three locations: regular workplace, home, and telecommuting center. Using data from 188 participants in the Neighborhood Telecenters Project, four job context perception factors were identified: productivity, job satisfaction, supervisor relationship, and co-worker interaction. Four generic workplace perception factors were identified (with measures for each of the work locations of interest): personal benefits, work effectiveness, autonomy, and supervisor comfort. A multinomial logit model of the desired work time allocation found the generic variables job suitability, personal benefits, and work effectiveness to be significant and positively related to greater desired proportions of time at the associated location. These variables capture the major elements previously hypothesized to influence telecommuting preference (including work, family, independence, and commute stress reduction drives as well as manager and job suitability constraints) in a parsimonious fashion. The model explained 55% of the theoretical maximum amount of information in the data, and did not violate the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) assumption.     

Forecasting telecommuting

Transportation planners increasingly recognize telecommuting as an important trend. But while they often advocate telecommuting as a transportation demand management strategy, transportation planners have made little progress toward incorporating telecommuting into transportation forecasts, at least partly because of the limited data available. In this paper we explore four alternative methodologies for forecasting telecommuting and discuss the kinds of data that must be collected before these methodologies can be applied. The first approach is trend extrapolation, using curves of technological substitution. Sufficient data are currently available to produce forecasts, albeit highly uncertain forecasts, using this approach. However, even with better data this approach does not address underlying factors and trends that will affect the future of telecommuting. As a result, we explore three additional approaches that should produce more reliable forecasts but which require new data and knowledge about telecommuting: analyzing the characteristics of telecommuters in contrast to nontelecommuters, analyzing factors affecting the individual choice to telecommute, and incorporating telecommuting into traditional transportation forecasting models.     

Workers wanted: Changing employee accessibility with industrial development ─ Evidence from Foxconn

In response to the trends of manufacturing revitalization and workforce shortage in the U.S., this study investigates how Foxconn changes accessibility to industrial employees by automobile and by transit in Southeast Wisconsin. Results suggest that there is a mismatch between the Foxconn site and the areas with high accessibility to industrial employees. With a great demand for labor, Foxconn reduces employee accessibility by automobile throughout the region, while its impact on employee accessibility by transit is more localized. The results inform industrial firm locations, workforce housing development, and transportation service provisions. The analysis framework shifts the angle of accessibility research to focusing on the perspective of employers, and it can be applied to investigate future large-scale economic development projects.     

Telecommuting and urban sprawl: mitigator or inciter?

There is some evidence to the effect that as cities become increasingly congested new housing starts occur at greater distances from urban centers while jobs tend to remain center-concentrated or develop in other suburbs. In either case, mean commute distances tend to increase. Telecommuting is seen as a means of increasing the jobs-housing balance in urban and suburban areas by enhancing the ability to move work to, or closer to, the workers' residences rather than requiring workers to commute to work daily. This has the immediate side effect of decreasing automobile congestion and associated energy consumption and air pollution. There is a possible longer term adverse impact of telecommuting resulting from its ability to decrease constraints on household location, thereby enhancing the rate of spread of suburbia. This paper reviews evidence concerning the possible effects of telecommuting on urban sprawl, as derived from a two-year test of telecommuting in California, and describes two scenarios of urban form development made more feasible by telecommuting.     

Using longitudinal methods for analysis of a short-term transportation demonstration project

This paper documents an application of panel, or longitudinal data collection in the evaluation of a TSM (Transportation Systems Management) demonstration project. The project was a four-week demonstration of staggered work hours in downtown Honolulu during February–March 1988. The 4 wave panel survey elicited commuting experiences of approximately 2,000 downtown employees at two week intervals before and during the project. The sample involved both employees who participated in the project by shifting their work hours, and those who did not. The panel survey was augmented by floating-car observations of travel times on major routes into downtown Honolulu on the same four dates.The purpose of the analysis was to determine whether employee commute times were affected, and if so, how these changes were distributed among various employee segments. Two methods were used. First, travel time changes were estimated using paired t-tests. Second, regression equations were used to estimate project time savings as a function of trip length, route, and location of residence. Results show that travel time savings due to the project were typically small, less than ten percent. Nonparticipants experienced greater savings than participants, and some segments of participants experienced longer travel times during the project. The panel method proved to be an effective way to measure project travel time impacts and shows that the method is appropriate in short time applications.Presented at the Annual Meeting of Transportation Research Board, January 7–11. 1990, Washington, D.C.     

Analyzing the preference for non-exclusive forms of telecommuting: Modeling and policy implications

This study examines three models of the individual's preference for home- and center-based telecommuting. Issues concerning the estimation of discrete models when the alternatives are non-exclusive are discussed. Two binary logit models are presented, one on the preference to telecommute from a center versus not telecommuting from a center (adjusted ² = 0.24), and the other on the preference to telecommute from a center over telecommuting from home (adjusted ² = 0.64). A nested logit model is also estimated on the following four alternatives: preferring not to telecommute, preferring either form of telecommuting, preferring to telecommute from home, and preferring to telecommute from a center (adjusted ² = 0.35).The results of the models illustrated the importance of attitudinal measures in measuring an individual's preference to telecommute. Oblique factor scores representing workplace interaction, stress, workaholism, internal control, and commute stress were statistically significant in some or all of the models. Other explanatory variables which were found to be consistently significant were education, job suitability, and age. Most respondents preferred either to telecommute from home or were indifferent between either form of telecommuting, which raises the question as to whether there really is a sizeable market niche to be filled by telecommuting centers, and hence whether they may make a significant contribution to transportation demand reduction.     

The economics of workplace charging

To overcome the range-anxiety problem and further shortcomings associated with electric vehicles, workplace charging (WPC) is gaining increasing attention. We propose a microeconomic model of WPC and use the approach to shed light on the incentives and barriers employees and employers face when deciding on demand for and supply of WPC. It is shown that under market conditions there is no WPC contract an employer is willing to offer and at the same time the majority of employees is willing to accept. To overcome the lack of demand or underprovision of WPC we discuss various ‘remedies’, involving subsidies to charging facility costs and adjustments in electricity tariffs or loading technologies. We find that direct subsidies to WPC facilities or subsidies combined with specific energy price policies could be a way to foster WPC provision. In contrast measures on the employee side that may help to stimulate the demand for WPC turn out to be less feasible. Hence, our results suggest that in order to promote WPC it is more promising to support employers in offering WPC contracts than to provide employees an incentive to accept WPC contracts. The study therefore gives a rationale for public initiatives being undertaken to boost WPC provision, as e.g. in the case of the US.     

The Mixed Logit model: The state of practice

The mixed logit model is considered to be the most promising state of the art discrete choice model currently available. Increasingly researchers and practitioners are estimating mixed logit models of various degrees of sophistication with mixtures of revealed preference and stated choice data. It is timely to review progress in model estimation since the learning curve is steep and the unwary are likely to fall into a chasm if not careful. These chasms are very deep indeed given the complexity of the mixed logit model. Although the theory is relatively clear, estimation and data issues are far from clear. Indeed there is a great deal of potential mis-inference consequent on trying to extract increased behavioural realism from data that are often not able to comply with the demands of mixed logit models. Possibly for the first time we now have an estimation method that requires extremely high quality data if the analyst wishes to take advantage of the extended behavioural capabilities of such models. This paper focuses on the new opportunities offered by mixed logit models and some issues to be aware of to avoid misuse of such advanced discrete choice methods by the practitioner.     

Fatigue in transport: a review of exposure,risks, checks and controls*

Human fatigue continues to threaten safe transport. There are claims that employers of operators should do more to mitigate the risks, and several regulators are promoting fatigue-risk management in the context of safety management systems (SMS). The current paper reviews fatigue-related risk and exposure factors and control measures for operators of land- and sea-based transport forms. Our review identifies 13 types of measures for the monitoring or control of fatigue risks: optimal staffing; optimal schedule design; optimisation of breaks/naps; monitoring of actual hours worked; optimisation of work content; monitoring and feedback of actual sleep; health screening and treatment; promotion of recovery from work; fitness-for-duty testing; monitoring of fatigue symptoms while operating; control of fatigue while operating; performance monitoring and assistance; and fatigue-proofing. We also identify two systemic measures needed to anchor risk mitigation in SMS: organisational learning and training/other. By structuring monitoring and control measures along Dawson and McCulloch’s [Managing fatigue: It’s about sleep. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 9(5), 365–380] fatigue-risk trajectory, a framework is obtained that acts as a guide for fatigue-risk management by transport employers. To inform transport managers further, evaluations are needed of the effectiveness of individual control measures as well as whole fatigue-risk management interventions.