Gustavo O Collantes

Telecommuting, residential location, and commute-distance traveled: evidence from State of California employees

This study analyzes retrospective data on telecommuting and residential and job location changes over a ten-year period, from 218 employees (62 current telecommuters, 35 former telecommuters, and 121 people who had never telecommuted) of six California state government agencies which had actively participated in the well-known pilot program of 1988–90. We compare estimates of the total commute person-miles traveled by telecommuters with those of nontelecommuters, on a quarterly basis. Key findings include the following. One-way commute distances were higher for telecommuters than for nontelecommuters, consistent with prior empirical evidence and with expectation. Average telecommuting frequency declined over time; several explanations are proposed, but cannot be properly tested with these data. The first two findings notwithstanding, the average quarterly per capita total commute distances were generally lower for telecommuters than for nontelecommuters, indicating that they telecommute often enough to more than compensate for their longer one-way commutes. We cannot say from these results whether the ability to telecommute is itself prompting individuals to move farther away, or whether telecommuting is simply more attractive to people who already live farther from work for other reasons. Even if the first is true, however, and telecommuting is the ‘problem’, it also appears to be the solution: that is, it enables people to achieve a desired but more distant residential location without a net increase in commute travel.

Exploring the Cognitive and Affective Mechanisms Behind Subjective Assessments of Travel Amounts

Travel demand models focus on explaining how much individuals actually travel but offer no insight into how much individuals think they travel. The authors propose that the latter is an important determinant of traveler behavior, and that actual mobility is refracted through a variety of filters that magnify or diminish those subjective evaluations of travel amounts. Linear regression models of subjective mobility measures provided by 1,358 San Francisco Bay Area commuters were estimated earlier; the focus of this article is on identifying the potential cognitive and affective mechanisms that influence subjective mobility upward or downward, after controlling for objective mobility. The authors find three major types of mechanisms: awareness-heightening, affective, and comparison-inducing. Recurring patterns of effects in these three categories are analyzed in the light of psychological and marketing research concepts including the availability heuristic, social comparison, relative deprivation, autobiographical memory, and motivation theory.