Does telecommuting reduce trip-making? Evidence from a US panel during the COVID-19 pandemic

Telecommuting has risen to unprecedented levels in the past three years and remains one of the most disrupted aspects of transportation behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we investigate the transport impacts of telecommuting. We use a combination of passively collected Point of Interest (POI) data between January 2020 and December 2021 and five waves of actively collected surveys on a panel of participants to quantify the effects of changes in the frequency of telecommuting on the total number of daily and weekly trips that a telecommuter makes, as well as their total daily and weekly distance traveled. We overcome important limitations of related work in the literature by controlling for unobserved confounders using fixed-effect and first-difference regressions. Doing so, we find evidence that telecommuting results in the generation of new noncommute trips that offset a significant portion of the reduction in commute trips. We show that telecommuters make an average of roughly one additional non-commute trip on telecommute days relative to commute days. The additional trip is on average shorter than the commute trip, as we find that the total distance traveled on telecommute days is significantly shorter than on commute days for employees in our panel. At the weekly level, we also find that one additional day of telecommuting results in one additional non-commute trip. This suggests that the additional noncommute trip on telecommuting days is a newly generated trip, rather than a trip substituted from other days of the week. The weekly analysis also confirms that the non-commute trip is on average shorter than the two-way commute trips, as the total weekly distance traveled by workers in our sample decreases by about 15 km for every day of telecommuting. Our results suggest that the trip reduction effects of telecommuting could be overestimated if telecommuting-induced new trip generation is not properly accounted for.