The relations between working from home and travel behaviour: a panel analysis

Abstract

Policies to increase the amount of time people spend working from home were widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since research suggests that the resulting increase in working from home will outlast these policies themselves, policy makers want to know what the expected effects of working from home on travel behaviour will be in a post-pandemic world. To answer this question it is important to understand the relations between working from home and travel behaviour. To improve the understanding of the relations between working from home and travel behaviour we apply longitudinal modelling techniques using panel data from the Netherlands Mobility Panel. This allows us to separate between-persons and within-persons relations and effects. We find a negative effect of working from home on commute travel time both before and during the pandemic and a positive effect on leisure travel time only during the pandemic. The sizes of these effects remained roughly similar during the pandemic, although the extent to which working from home affects commute travel time increased during the pandemic. The net effect of working from home on travel time as a whole is negative, indicating that working from home policies could be used to reduce travel time. The results show that part of the relationships between working from home and travel behaviour has changed during the pandemic. As a result, policy makers and transport operators should be careful when estimating future travel demand based on extrapolations of relationships found only before or during the pandemic.