Does teleworking encourage longer commutes? Pre-pandemic evidence from the English National Travel Survey

Teleworking could make an important contribution to reducing car travel, air pollution and carbon emissions. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that teleworkers tend to live further from their place of work than non-teleworkers, and that teleworking encourages more non-work travel. These responses make it difficult to estimate the overall impact of teleworking on personal travel.

This study estimates the impact of teleworking on English travel patterns over the period 2005 to 2019. We focus on whether people choose to telework because they live a long distance from their workplace, or whether they choose to live a long distance from their workplace because they can telework.

We employ a path analysis methodology using data from the English National Travel Survey. We estimate the direct and indirect effects of working from home on the travel patterns of both the teleworker and other members of their household. Our results suggest that teleworking causes people to live farther from their workplace rather than vice versa. We further find that most teleworkers travel farther each week than non-teleworkers and they only achieve travel savings if they work from home for three or more days each week. Our results support the findings of other studies in this area and suggest that public policy needs to target sustainable land-use and transport planning more broadly, rather than encouraging teleworking specifically.