research report

Parking, Working from Home, and Travel Behavior

Abstract

Drawing on the California Household Travel Survey, the research demonstrates strong associations between choosing to drive and having free parking at work or home. The research team found that the median household vehicle in California spends 22 hours a day parked and that households with parking included in the rent or purchase price of their homes are more likely to drive and less likely to use transit. The team further found that employees with free parking at work are more likely to drive for their commutes. Regressions were estimated that analyzed the decision to work from home. Largely for data reasons, these regressions are less conclusive.

published journal article

Going Nowhere Fast: Are Changing Activity Patterns Behind Falling Personal Travel?

Abstract

The inexorable rise in personal travel in the 20th century has given way to stagnation in the 21st, a phenomenon some call “peak travel.” We use 2003–2019 data from the American Time Use Survey to explore whether and why personal travel per capita has stopped growing. We show that time spent on personal travel has been dropping consistently over these years, and suggest that one important cause is likely a dramatic and ongoing decline in the time Americans spend on out-of-home activities. We find significant changes in time spent on many of the 34 activities conducted inside and outside of the home that we examine. Many of these changes appear related to advances in information and communications technology (ICT), as this period saw the quality of in-home ICT continually rising and its real cost falling, resulting in ever-improving gaming, surfing, watching, and streaming options. For example, our data suggest that out-of-home work and shopping time fell significantly during our study period, while in-home time spent on work and education rose. Game playing (presumably mostly computer games) and TV watching in the home both increased dramatically, while attendance at live entertainment, arts, and sports activities fell. Reading and writing fell substantially both inside and outside the home, perhaps replaced by electronic communication. Our findings suggest that increased in-home ICT use may have been associated with 25–30% of the reduction of out-of-home time. We also find a significant increase in sleeping and a decrease in time spent eating and drinking both inside and outside of the home. Although we deliberately chose to examine time use and travel prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we suspect that, even as the pandemic fades, the trend toward more time at home and less time spent traveling may well increase further.

policy brief

The Future of Working Away from Work

Publication Date

March 14, 2023

Author(s)

Samuel Speroni, Brian D. Taylor, Mark Garrett

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic turned American work life outside-in. Before March 2020, nearly all workers worked outside of the home all or most of the time. In the spring of 2020, at least half worked at home as a result of stay-at-home recommendations and orders1 and enabled by advances in online video-communication technologies. Telecommuting is not new; it grew slowly in the four decades leading up to the outbreak. From 1980 the share of California’s workforce working primarily at home rose from just under 2% to 6% (see blue line in Figure 1), similar to national trends (red line). It peaked at 62% in May 2020, but was back down to 37% by the end of the year. But fully two years later the average was roughly 30%, a five-fold increase over pre-pandemic levels.2 Remote work appears here to stay.This dramatic shift has profound implications for transportation as much of the system is designed to carry morning and evening commuters into and out of downtowns and other office centers. While vehicle traffic, which plummeted in the early months of pandemic, has since rebounded, public transit ridership has yet to fully recover – with most systems stuck at about under three-quarters of pre-pandemic levels. Researchers at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies have analyzed the extensive research literature and more recent reports on working-from-home and travel to determine how it affects travel and what a future of elevated remote work means for our transportation systems.

research report

The Future of Working Away from Work and Daily Travel: A Research Synthesis

Publication Date

March 3, 2023

Author(s)

Samuel Speroni, Brian D. Taylor

Abstract

This research synthesizes literature on the relationship between working from home and travel. This relationship is a pertinent one because transportation planners and policymakers have long hoped that increased remote work, sometimes called telecommuting or telework, will reduce driving, traffic congestion, and vehicle emissions. This question is especially pertinent today because working from home increased dramatically early in the COVID-19 pandemic and has remained at substantially elevated levels since then. To examine this issue, the team reviews nearly 100 research articles, reports, and some popular accounts of telecommuting and travel prior to and during the pandemic. In conducting this review, the team arrives at five principal findings. First, remote work increased dramatically with the onset of the pandemic and appears likely to remain elevated for many years to come. Second, while not everyone can work remotely, for those who have the option to do so, at least part-time, this hybrid option is extremely popular with most workers. Third, employers tend to be skeptical of the benefits of remote work, but the research does not support fears of declining productivity in the near term, and the tight post-pandemic labor market has given workers leverage to insist on remote work options. Fourth, telecommuting has long been touted as a potential solution to chronic transportation problems like traffic congestion and vehicle emissions, but the research has consistently found that it is more likely to increase, rather than decrease, overall driving among remote workers. This extra driving is due both to hybrid workers living farther from work, on average, than non-remote workers and to all remote workers making more household-serving and personal trips when they work from home. And fifth, public transit systems, in contrast to street and highway systems, have been dramatically affected by the pandemic, likely due substantially to the rise in remote work it has engendered. The future of many public transit systems, which draw an outsized share of their riders from commuters to downtowns and other major job centers, will depend on whether and to what extent those job centers re-densify with workers in the months and years ahead.

published journal article

Pandemic transit: Examining transit use changes and equity implications in Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles

Abstract

While the COVID-19 pandemic upended many aspects of life as we knew it, its effects on U.S. public transit were especially dramatic. Many former transit commuters began to work from home or switched to traveling via private vehicles. But for those who continued to work outside the home and could not drive—who were more likely low-income and Black or Hispanic—transit remained an important means of mobility. However, most transit agencies reduced service during the first year of the pandemic, reflecting reduced ridership demand, increasing costs, and uncertain budgets. To analyze the effects of the pandemic on transit systems and their users, we examine bus ridership changes by neighborhood in Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles from 2019 to 2020. Combining aggregated stop-level boarding data, passenger surveys, and census data, we identify associations between shifting travel patterns and neighborhoods. We find that early in the pandemic, neighborhoods with more poor and non-white households lost proportionally fewer riders; however, this gap between high- and low-ridership-loss neighborhoods shrank as the pandemic wore on. We also model ridership change controlling for multiple factors. Ridership in Houston and LA generally outperformed Boston, with the built environment and demographic factors accounting for some of the observed differences. Neighborhoods with high shares of Hispanic and African American residents retained more riders in the pandemic, while those with higher levels of auto access and with more workers able to work from home lost more riders, all else equal. We conclude that transit’s social service role elevated during the pandemic, and that serving travelers in disadvantaged neighborhoods will likely remain paramount emerging from it.

policy brief

Are Accessibility Evaluation Tools Ready for Prime Time?

Abstract

In the United States, local governments typically evaluate the transportation impacts of new development based on the expected effects of the development on nearby traffic flows. These flows are most often measured in terms of “level-of-service,” or LOS, from “A” (free flow) to “F” (forced flow). If a traffic impact analysis (TIA) finds that the LOS on streets and intersections near the proposed development will degrade below a certain threshold, the project developer may be required to undertake mitigation efforts, including funding nearby transportation system improvements to lessen the projected traffic delays occasioned by the new development and/or reduce the scale of the proposal — or they may risk the project not being approved at all. LOS mitigation frequently ignores travel via modes — such as walking, biking, scooters, or public transit — other than motor vehicles. This emphasis on nearby traffic effects and motor vehicle mobility can discourage development in already built-up areas and, in doing so, ignore both the project’s regional effects on travel and traffic and the economic, social, and environmental benefits that arise from agglomerations of activities.In response, a growing number of researchers and practitioners have argued that an accessibility-focused approach would be a more conceptually complete and practical way to assess the transportation effects of new developments. Accessibility analyses consider the ease by which various destinations can be accessed by foot, bike, and public transit, as well as by car, and how proposed new developments might change this. As the number of accessibility adherents in planning research and practice has grown, there has been significant progress in the development of access evaluation measures and tools. For this research, we (1) developed a conceptual framework for accessibility analysis (Figure 1), (2) used this framework to assess the promise and pitfalls of 54 measures and tools developed to evaluate access, and (3) conducted interviews with five practitioners around the U.S. to learn about early efforts to incorporate access measurement into planning practice.

published journal article

Tools of the Trade? Assessing the Progress of Accessibility Measures for Planning Practice

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings:
A growing number of planning researchers and practitioners argue for a shift from mobility-centered transportation planning to an accessibility-focused one. Accessibility is a compelling concept that has proven more difficult to operationalize than mobility, which helps to explain why so many accessibility metrics have been developed for urban research and planning practice. To assess the state of these metrics, we reviewed 54 of them in light of their theoretical basis, data requirements, units of analysis, travel modes and trip purposes accounted for, and potential applications to planning practice. We also reviewed the substantial literature on accessibility measurement and interviewed planning practitioners who are applying accessibility metrics in practice. We find that accessibility theory and measurement have advanced more rapidly than applications in practice. However, a new generation of tools is emerging that may accelerate the move to accessibility planning. Although many of the measures focus on a single travel mode, the number of multimodal metrics is growing. Most of the measures are designed for regional-scale planning and scenario evaluation; only a few to date are intended for project evaluation.

Takeaway for practice:
The 54 accessibility metrics and tools we reviewed vary widely and none stands out as obviously superior for planning practice. Although most calculate the accessibility of places, and many do so reasonably well, we see the most promise in measures of the accessibility of travelers, which can then be aggregated for place-based analyses while still shedding light on how access can vary substantially across different types of travelers. The principal challenge to broadly deploying accessibility analyses in practice in the years ahead is in developing measures that meaningfully measure the many salient dimensions of access, have manageable data requirements, and are understandable to planners, public officials, and community members.

other

Is Accessibility Evaluation Ready for Prime Time?

website

Bulldozing Asian Communities: Freeway Construction and Urban Renewal in Stockton

research report

Evaluating Place-based Transportation Plans

Abstract

The paper asks how place-based transportation plans are being evaluated, and what insights from the broader policy and plan evaluation research literature might inform evaluation design. We complement a review of the evaluation literature with six expert interviews with 15 people. We find that California agencies and their community partners have high expectations for evaluations of place-based transportation plans. So far, however, those evaluations have been less successful in providing detailed information on outcomes and the causal impact of interventions. This does not reflect the shortcomings of the evaluation teams, but rather the inherent challenges in holistically assessing a diverse set of projects on different implementation timelines in a project area with porous boundaries. There is also a fundamental difficulty with the evaluation scale. California’s place-based transportation plans have often been evaluated individually. But in general, evaluations, particularly quantitative causal inference methods, are most effective with a larger number of projects or sites. We suggest a two-pronged approach to addressing the tensions that we identify between place-specific knowledge and generalizable conclusions. The first prong, at the site level, would emphasize process evaluations and assessment of outputs and outcomes. The second prong would focus on impacts across multiple sites and the extent to which place-based transportation programs have a causal role.