Telecommuting and environmental policy - lessons from the Ecommute program

Telecommuting and Environmental Policy

Table 6. Mode Choice of Employees in the ecommute Program, on All Non-Telecommuting
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.

We can compare the figures in Tables 5 and 6 with mode choice numbers from other sources.
Table 7 shows estimates for the year 2000 from the Federal Highway Administration’s Journey to Work
survey for the five ecommute cities.¹⁶ This is a broad survey across employees, some with access to
telecommuting options but many more without. Thus, compared with employees in the ecommute
program, we would expect far fewer respondents to report working at home. The last column of Table 7
confirms this expectation. Thus, it is probably best to compare the percentages in Table 7 with those in
Table 6, the mode share figures on non-telecommuting days. The “drove alone” percentages in the
ecommute program for Denver and Houston are almost identical to those obtained from the Journey to
Work survey; Philadelphia’s “drove alone” percentage is also quite close. The figures for Washington,
DC, and Los Angeles, however, differ significantly. In Washington, far more employees in the
ecommute program report driving alone and far fewer use public transit than in the large sample
surveyed in the "Journey to Work" study. This is likely due to the fact that the companies enrolled in the
ecommute program are primarily suburban Northern Virginia companies and not D.C. firms with ready
access to Metro. The Los Angeles results, as expected, do not match the Journey to Work findings at
all. Less than 5% of people in L.A. use transit and nearly 73% drive alone to work, according to the
Journey to Work, but in the ecommute program those percentages, on non-telecommuting days, are 27%
and 60%, respectively.

Table 7. Commute Mode Choice, from 2000 Journey to Work Survey, by CMSA

Average Number of Survey Respondents Who Report that They Use Each
Mode as Percentage of Total Survey Respondents

¹⁶ The areas covered in the FHWA study are Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas (CMSAs) that include a
broader geographical area than the ecommute program.

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