Recently the US Department of Transportation announced its new comprehensive National Strategy to reduce congestion on nation's roads. Metropolitanareas would commit to pursuit of aggressive strategies under the umbrellaof "Four Ts" -- tolling, transit, telecommuting and technology. The goal is to use all strategies simultaneously to achieve the best results. However, how well these various measures work together is not well understood. For example, promoting telecommuting can potentially undermine other alternatives such as public transit and carpools, and vice versa. In this study, we combined data from the 2002 SCAG Telework Survey with the data on travel time and congestion produced by the SCAG travel demand model and the GIS data on public transit system in the region. Since the SCAG Survey distinguished home business owners from the employees, allowed for separation of partial-day telecommuters from the full-day ones and contained a wealthof demographic and occupational information, we are able to distinguish the effects of demographic, job-related, and geographic variables, as well as the effects of commute distance, congestion, residential and employments density and transit availability on workers' propensity to telecommute. We find that distinguishing full-day telecommuters from partial day telecommuters is very important; failure to separate those two groups leads to drastically different econometric results and different conclusions for telecommuting policy formulation. Also, as expected, the propensity to telecommute full-day is increasing with commuting distance. However, this lattereffect is significantly weakened when workers have access to public transit.
Abstract