Telecommuting and environmental policy - lessons from the Ecommute program

Telecommuting and Environmental Policy

Los Angeles             72.7           15.2            4.6          4.0             3.6

Philadelphia              73.5            10.3             8.6           4.8              2.8

¹The drove-alone option includes motorcycles.

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

³This survey uses the term “work at home” rather than teleworking or telecommuting.

In Table 8 below, we summarize the ecommute mode choice and telework data in a slightly
different way. We calculate the proportion of days that each employee telecommutes, drives alone to
work, and so forth, and then report averages across employees. So although employees have different
numbers of days reported, we make employees comparable by looking at the proportion of their days in
the system that they undertake each activity. In Table 8, we show only the drove alone, transit, and
telecommuting options.

The telework percentage across all five cities is roughly the same as it was in Table 5: on
average, employees have telecommuted 35% of the days that they have worked and reported to
Teletrips. The percentages for the individual cities are also comparable to those in Table 5, with the
exception of Washington, DC. According to Table 5, 36% of the total days reported in DC are
telecommuting days but according to Table 7, the average employee has telecommuted only 22% of his
workdays. This must mean that there are a few heavy teleworkers in the DC area who have been with
the program for a while, or at least reported to Teletrips relatively more than have others in that region.
This brings up the average in Table 5 relative to Table 8. Similarly, the “drove alone” percentage for
DC is lower in Table 5 than in Table 8. In both Tables 5 and 8, the percentage of workdays
telecommuted in Philadelphia is quite high, 50.8% in Table 8. This high number appears to be primarily
a result of a set of 17 employees at Amtrak who report that they telework nearly every day.

Table 8. Average Number of Days Employees in the ecommute Program
Used Each Commute Mode, as Percentage of Total Work Days

As of March 1, 2004

¹Drove alone option includes motorcycles.

²Teleworked includes telework centers, as well as working at home.

5.3. Estimates of Emissions Reductions from the ecommute Program

As we explained in Section 4 above, participants in the ecommute program report the age, make,
and model of the vehicle in which they commute each day, as well as the distance traveled to and from
work. This means that, armed with emissions factors by vehicle age for each individual city, we can
compute a fairly reliable estimate of the emissions avoided by telecommuting, on an individual
employee basis. We obtain these emissions factors, in grams per mile, from runs of EPA’s MOBILE
model for four of the five cities and from runs of California’s EMFAC2002 model for Los Angeles.
Both models have very detailed emission factors, specific to both vehicle type (passenger car,
motorcycle, large and small trucks, etc.) and vehicle age. Vehicle age is a crucial piece of information
for estimating emissions benefits from avoided trips, because technological improvements have

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