Working from Home: Modeling the Impact of Telework on Transportation and Land Use

More and more employees work at least part of their working hours from home. While this reduces the number of work trip, the time saved on commuting may be used for additional non-work trips or longer trips, often in the off-peak hours. In the long-run, the option to do telework also reduces the constrain to life in relative proximity to the workplace, and thereby, may induce urban sprawl. Vice versa, long commute times from home to work may trigger employees to request the option to telework. The research presented in this paper proposes a modelling concept to microscopically simulate the decision to telework, the resulting travel demand for work and non-work trips, and household relocation. By explicitly representing a travel time budget for every household, the tendency to add non-work trips is modelled endogenously for teleworkers. A model for household relocation explicitly accounts for the travel time to work, and this constraint is loosened proportionally to the number days of telework per week.