The COVID-19 pandemic greatly increased the share of employees who worked completely or part-time from home - and the effects have continued because many employers saved on expenses. Workers in their pajamas found it minimized travel and clothing costs and was more convenient.
Yet, while remote work could cut hundreds of millions of tons of carbon emissions from car travel, it would also result in a huge amount of income loss to bus, subway, train, and other public transit companies, according to a new American-Chinese study.
Using the latest data on remote work and transportation behavior since the pandemic upended work arrangements, researchers at the University of Florida, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Peking University revealed how cities could meet their sustainability goals by promoting remote work. They published their findings in the journal Nature Cities under the title “Impacts of remote work on vehicle miles traveled and transit ridership in the USA.”
The researchers found that a 10% increase in remote workers could lead to a 10% drop in carbon emissions from the transportation sector - or nearly 200 million tons of carbon dioxide a year across the US alone, thanks to fewer car trips. However, the same proportion of remote work would reduce transit fare revenue by $3.7 billion nationally, a whopping 27% drop.
Now, they work exclusively from home, but as many as half of all workers may work remotely at least part of the time.
Remote work impact on transit
“Transit agencies need to be very concerned,” said University of Florida urban planning Prof. Shenhao Wang, who supervised the new study. “Yet overall, we would expect less energy consumption from reduced car travel - so the picture is very complicated and whether the effects are positive or negative depends on the stakeholder.”
Urban planners have long considered remote work a way to reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions. But before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was challenging to analyze the effects of remote work because few employees worked from home. The pandemic's speedy rise and continued investment in remote work finally allowed researchers to see how the trend affects urban mobility.
The new study covered the period from April 2020 to October 2022. It included data from Google on remote work patterns, along with information from the US Federal Highway Administration for car travel and a national database for transit ridership. The researchers correlated transportation behavior with the rise and fall in remote work in different states and metropolitan areas to uncover the effect of increased remote work on car travel and public transit.
They discovered that public transit ridership fell more than twice as fast as car travel did in response to the same drop in on-site workers.
“People mostly rely on transit to go to work. When people start to work from home, their need to commute is largely reduced. So, a large portion of transit ridership was no longer needed,” said MIT postdoctoral researcher Yunhan Zheng, the lead author of the new paper. “On the other hand, many people rely on vehicles for trips other than going to work. They go shopping, to restaurants, and leisure activities. Those activities may not necessarily disappear when people work from home.”
Because of these differences between driving and transit behavior, “this may pose a challenge for transit agencies in terms of their financial sustainability, so they may need to take some actions to cope with this. For example, they could provide more services during the off-peak hours in residential areas to better serve remote workers,” said Zheng, who also added that they will continue analyzing the effects of remote work on urban mobility as new data becomes available and employment trends move further past the immediate effects of the pandemic.