Telecommuting and environmental policy - lessons from the Ecommute program

Telecommuting and Environmental Policy

grams/mile, multiplied by the reported round-trip commute mileage from home to office.¹⁹ In the
second scenario, we use the information on mode choices that employees report to Teletrips and adjust
this figure downward. Specifically, for each employee the emissions reduction is the emissions factor,
in grams per mile, multiplied by round-trip mileage multiplied by the percentage attributable to the
“drove alone” option. This second scenario thus assumes that some of the telecommuting workers
would otherwise have used public transit, walked or biked, or ridden in a car or vanpool.²⁰

Table 12 shows total VOC and NOx emissions reductions for each city under the two mode
choice assumptions. Emissions reductions are greater under Scenario 1 because credit is taken for the
full mileage from home to office (or telework center to office) on every day that the employee reports
that she teleworks. Thus emissions benefits shown in the first two columns are approximately 18%
greater than those shown in the latter two columns. Under both scenarios, Denver shows the greatest
total emissions benefits because employees there have been in the program longer and thus report more
days telecommuting. Los Angeles shows the least benefit because of fewer employees who have
enrolled later. Emissions reductions across all cities since inception of the program through February
2004 total approximately 2 tons each of VOC and NOx.

Table 13 provides more information by showing emissions reductions per telecommuting day -
in other words, the numbers in Table 12 are divided by the total number of days of telecommuting for
each city.

Table 12. Total Emissions Reductions from ecommute Program

June 1, 2001 - Feb. 29, 2004

(in pounds)

¹Under Scenario 1, it is assumed that employees would have driven alone to work every telecommuting
day had they not telecommuted.

²Under Scenario 2, it is assumed that employees would have driven alone to work some fraction of the
time based on reported mode choices.

Table 13. Emissions Reductions from ecommute Program, Per Telecommuting Day

June 1, 2001 - Feb. 29, 2004

(in pounds per day)

¹⁹ When the employee uses a telework center and reports the distance to the telework center, we account for that in
our mileage calculations. If the distance is unreported, which it was for approximately 50 employees, we multiply
the reported home-to-office distance by the average ratio of the home-to-telework-center distance to home-to-
office distance, across employees, to obtain an estimate of the home-to-telework center distance.

²⁰ For those few employees who report that they telecommute every day, we have no information on what their
mode choice would have been had they not telecommuted. In these cases, we use the average “drove-alone”
percentage for the rest of the sample, 77% (see Table 9 above), to adjust their emissions reductions.

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