Home-based telecommuting and commuting behavior

The existing spatial models for home-based telecommuting assume that all the jobs are located at the central business district. At the same time, they do not duly treat the conflicting interests of the employer and the employee in adopting the telecommuting as an alternative work mode. The first objective of the paper is to present a spatial equilibrium model overcoming some of these important modeling drawbacks. The second objective is substantive. In the city where telecommuting is adopted, the conventional commuting pattern may no longer prevail: one may commute more to distant workplace than to the nearby workplace. Using the concept of relocation and substitution effects, I show how these two effects are interacting in their impacts on the household's time allocation and the vehicle distance traveled (VDT). It is shown that most of the commute time saved is again put for more work and no more time could be allocated to leisure hours. In addition, when people put a high value on the work on site, the VDT may even increase.