The relations between working from home and travel behaviour: a panel analysis

Abstract

Policies to increase the amount of time people spend working from home were widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since research suggests that the resulting increase in working from home will outlast these policies themselves, policymakers want to understand the relations between working from home and travel behaviour. We apply longitudinal modelling techniques to estimate the relations between working from home and travel behaviour using panel data from the Netherlands Mobility Panel spanning the years 2017 through 2021. This allows us to separate between-persons and within-persons relations and effects and to see whether these effects changed during the pandemic. We find a negative effect of working from home on commute travel time both before and during the pandemic and a positive effect on leisure travel time only before the pandemic. The sizes of these effects remained roughly similar during the pandemic, although the extent to which working from home affected commute travel time increased during the pandemic. The net effect of working from home on travel time is negative, indicating that working from home policies could be used to reduce travel time. The results also show that some of the relationships between working from home and travel behaviour have changed during the pandemic. As a result, policymakers and transport operators should be careful when estimating future travel demand based on extrapolations of relationships found only before or during the pandemic.