Telecommuting, travel behavior and residential location choice: Can telecommuting be an effective policy to reduce travel demand

Whether telecommuting and personal travel are complements or substitutes is a key question in urban policy analysis. Urban planners and policy makers have proposed telecommuting as part of travel demand management (TDM) programs to reduce street and highway congestion. Based on small samples, several empirical studies have found that telecommuting has a substitution effect (although small) on conventional commuting, and have thus argued that policies promoting telecommuting might be promising in reducing travel.;Using data from the 2001 and 2009 National Household Travel Surveys (NHTS), this study involves two large national samples to try to more accurately identify the impact of telecommuting on personal and household travel patterns. Through a series of empirical tests, this research investigates how telecommuting influences workers' one-way commute trips, daily total work trips and daily non-work trips, how these influences differ across different MSA sizes, and how telecommuting affects household commute trips. The results of these tests suggest that telecommuting has been an important factor in shaping personal and household travel patterns over the 2001--2009 period, and that telecommuting consistently has a complementary effect on not just workers' one-way commute trips, daily total work trips and total non-work trips, but also household total commute trips.