Telecommuting and environmental policy - lessons from the Ecommute program

Telecommuting and Environmental Policy

those employees who chose to sign up, and they are likely to be people who want to, and are able to,
telecommute relatively often - just under 2 days per week, on average. We have no information on the
general, non-telecommuting, workforce. Another problem that may come into play, and one that we
mentioned above, is that people may be reporting more faithfully during the weeks in which they have
some telecommuting and not reporting in other weeks. This could bias the mode choice percentages
and in particular, raise the percentage of workdays that are telecommuting days above what it actually
is.

Table 5. Mode Choice of Employees in the ecommute Program on All Workdays, By City

As of March 1, 2004

¹The drove-alone option includes motorcycles.

²The other category includes a self-reported “other” option as well as walking, bicycling, and roller-blading.

³Telework includes working at home and working at a telework center. Very few employees reported using a
telework center.

The figures vary in some rather surprising ways across the cities. Los Angeles, the land of the
automobile, has the lowest percentage of days in which employees drove to work alone and by far the
highest percentage using public transit - over 17% of the time, employees in L.A. reportedly use transit.
By contrast, in Philadelphia, transit is used only 7.3% of the time. Houston has the lowest reported
telework days in the system at 18.3%. That city also has the highest “drove alone” percentage and the
highest reported carpool and vanpool use.

It is also interesting to look at these same percentages for non-telework days. In other words,
on the days that the employee worked but did not telecommute, what does he report as his commute
mode? Table 8 shows the findings in the data. If all employees who telecommute would otherwise have
driven alone to work - a typical assumption made in many studies when looking at the congestion and
emission benefits from telecommuting - we would expect that the percentages in the first column of
Table 6 would be roughly equal to the sum of the first and last columns of Table 5. In other words, the
percentages attributable to teleworking in Table 5 would now be included in the “drove alone” option.
This is not the case, however. Instead, the percentages for all modes rise. We will return to this point
when we discuss the emissions reductions from the ecommute program in Section 5.3 below. Across all
five cities, driving alone takes place on 77% of reported workdays when employees do not
telecommute; transit accounts for 6% of all non-telecommuting workdays, and car and vanpools
approximately 10%.

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