Examination of the Impacts of Telecommuting on the Time Use of Nonmandatory Activities

Abstract

How and to what extent telecommuting engagement affects time allocation among nonmandatory activities are examined to help understand the impacts of telecommuting on daily activity–travel patterns. Five categories of nonmandatory activities are considered: shopping, maintenance, discretionary, escort, and in-home shopping. The hypothesis is that telecommuting relaxes the temporal and spatial constraints related to work activities at the regular workplace, and telecommuters may allocate some of the time budget to other nonmandatory activities, which may or may not lead to additional travel. The structural equations model approach is applied to capture the impacts of telecommuting as well as the interactions among the nonmandatory activities. The activity durations by type along with the number of total daily trips are considered as endogenous (dependent) variables. By incorporating work hours at the regular workplace and daily telecommuting hours as exogenous variables, the models can reveal how people may reallocate their time among different nonmandatory activities given different levels of telecommuting engagement (either part-day or full-day). All types of telecommuting arrangements increased nonmandatory activity durations (compared with those of nontelecommuters). Full-day telecommuters have higher durations of discretionary activities, while part-day telecommuters have higher durations of maintenance and out-of-home shopping errands. Telecommuting also increased total daily trip rates for both telecommuters and their household members. This study used data obtained from the 2010–2011 Regional Household Travel Survey in the New York metropolitan region.