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.