Telecommuting and environmental policy - lessons from the Ecommute program

provided by Research Papers in Economics

Telecommuting and Environmental Policy:
Lessons from the ecommute Program^∈

Margaret Walls
Peter Nelson

Elena Safirova^*

Resources for the Future

1616 P St NW
Washington, DC 20036, USA
{Walls; Nelson; Safirova} @ rff.org

Prepared for presentation at the 45^th Congress of European Regional Science Association

June 15, 2005

ABSTRACT

In 1999 US Congress passed the National Air Quality and Telecommuting Act. This Act established pilot
telecommuting programs (ecommute) in five major US metropolitan areas with the purpose of studying the
feasibility of addressing air quality concerns through telecommuting. The major goal of the ecommute program
was to examine whether a particular type of economic incentive, tradable emissions credits from telecommuting,
represents a viable strategy for reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and improving air quality. Under the
ecommute program, companies could generate emissions credits by reducing the VMT of their workforce through
telework programs. They would then be able to sell the credits to firms that needed the reductions to comply with
air quality regulations.

The paper provides analysis of the results of the ecommute program. First, we establish some context for
evaluating whether the envisioned trading scheme represents a feasible approach to reducing mobile source
emissions and promoting telecommuting and review the limited experience with mobile source emissions trading
programs. We find that from a regulatory perspective, the most substantial drawback to such a program is its
questionable environmental integrity, resulting from difficulties in designing sufficiently rigorous quantification
protocols to accurately measure the emissions reductions from telecommuting. And perhaps more importantly,
such a program is not likely to be cost-effective since the emissions reductions from a single telecommuter are
very small.

The paper also presents the first analysis of data collected from the ecommute program. Using two-and-one-half
years of data, we look at telecommuting frequency, mode choice, and emissions reductions as well as at reporting
behavior and dropout rates. Finally, we use the program's emissions reductions findings to calculate how much
telecommuting would be needed to reach an annual volatile organic compounds emission reduction target in each
city.

Keywords: telecommuting, emissions, emissions trading, mode choice, air quality

JEL codes: R4, Q53, Q58

^∈ this work was a part of a project funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency through a subcontract with
the Global Environment and Technology Foundation

^* corresponding author

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