Planning

Does Working From Home Cut Emissions? It's Complicated.

Remote working arrangements (RWAs) are having a large impact on transport. This research undertook a comprehensive review of papers on the topic.

Key Takeaways

• RWAs significantly reduce commuting trips, particularly in urban settings and among higher-income workers. However, these reductions are frequently offset by rebound effects, such as increased non-work trips, greater car ownership, or relocation to low-density, car-dependent areas.
• RWAs have contributed to reduced public transport use alongside increased reliance on private cars.
• When commuting is reduced, activities previously linked to the journey to or from work may be shifted online, moved closer to home, retimed or undertaken as standalone trips.
• The most consistent temporal effect is the flattening of morning and evening peaks.
• Teleworking increases active non-work trips mainly in accessible neighbourhoods, suggesting a strong interaction between RWAs and compact urban form.
• Modal outcomes depend on how RWAs redistribute activities across time and space, and on whether local environments support low-carbon alternatives.
• Remote workers are less likely to chain multi-stop circuits across the city, producing more fragmented but spatially compact standalone trips.
• Female teleworkers are more likely to undertake escorting and shopping, and RWAs may reinforce traditional gender roles in households with children.
• RWAs reshape consumption by altering domestic routines and the infrastructures through which households access goods and services. The result is not a simple substitution of physical shopping by e-commerce, but a hybridisation of digital purchasing, delivery logistics and retimed or localised store visits.
• RWAs cannot be assessed environmentally through commuting reductions alone. Their climate effects emerge from interactions among travel substitution, activity reallocation, household energy, office-space adaptation, digital infrastructure and logistics.

Comment

Clearly, the impact of RWAs on transport is complicated. There has been a recent tendency to think that reducing travel through working from home and online meetings would be good for reducing emissions. However, this has not yet been validated as the rebound effects kick in.

What Next?

Do you have a good understanding of how RWAs are impacting transport (and emissions) where you are?

Strategy

The Global Costs of Driving

I have argued that a key problem with our transport systems is car subsidies that increase driving. This piece of research estimates those subsidies.

Key Takeaways

• Globally, private car travel currently incurs approximately USD 0.16 per vehicle-kilometre in private costs (paid by drivers) and USD 0.55 per vehicle-kilometre in social costs (paid by society).
• This study assesses the social cost of CO₂ emissions, noise pollution, soil and water pollution, land use and infrastructure maintenance, and accidents. Congestion costs are excluded.
• 77% of the cost of automobility is currently externalized.
• Scaled globally, these unit costs translate to roughly USD 2.1 trillion in private and USD 7.2 trillion (6.1% of global GDP) in social costs per year under an internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV)-dominated system.
• This share is higher than in previous studies, which found that 30–40% of total automobility costs are social costs. The difference is largely due to a relatively high cost of carbon and value of a life.
• Electric, autonomous, and shared mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) systems have been proposed as alternatives to the current car-based regime, replacing large-scale privately owned cars.
• Private costs include parking and vehicle operation, purchase, maintenance, insurance, and end-of-life management.
• Under a full E-AV-MaaS scenario with 25% reduced vehicle-kilometers traveled, social costs fall to approximately USD 0.30 per kilometer and USD 2.4 trillion in total.
• Private costs are estimated between USD 0.7 and 1.9 trillion, as lower parking expenditures are offset by the higher per-kilometer cost of autonomous electric vehicle services.
• Shifts to public and active transport may yield additional or greater benefits, but are less likely scenarios given car attachment and political reluctance to interfere with the system of automobility.
• Results yield a central estimate of approximately $680 billion in annual travel time cost savings under E-AV-MaaS (range: $0.45–$0.91 trillion). However, because of the number of assumptions, these were excluded from the headline figures.

Comment

Obviously, the exact numbers can be contested (for example, I think the parking land use figures are light), depending on the assumptions you use and whether we include congestion costs, but many studies show that cars are heavily subsidised.

Personally, I find the E-AV MaaS vision limited. If we are not careful, it will come at the cost of public and active transport.

Carefully calibrating costs and incentives will be critical to delivering the best overall transport systems of the future.

Free fares show how difficult this can be, as they're often far more effective at reducing walking and cycling than at getting people out of cars.

What Next?

Do you have effective policies in place to reduce car subsidies?

Strategy

Commingling Paratransit and Demand- Responsive Transport

Having previously sat on the board of a community transport (paratransit) organisation, I'm particularly interested in how we can better integrate these services into the wider mobility ecosystem for users' benefit. This article and this research examine how paratransit can be integrated (commingled) with demand-responsive transport.

Key Takeaways

• Operating paratransit service alongside demand-responsive transit has proven a powerful strategy for boosting efficiency while improving the rider experience.
• There are 4 distinct commingled service models:

1. A unified technology platform, empowering the same schedulers and dispatchers to manage both services.
   • Using the same software for paratransit and microtransit is a simple but powerful step toward improving network-wide efficiency and maximizing resources.
   • Reservationists and dispatchers can be shared between services, reducing training time and empowering agents to book and dispatch across multiple services simultaneously.
   • Running both services on the same back-end algorithms increases the overall number of vehicles on the platform, which typically results in more attractive pricing.
2. A shared fleet, with the vehicles flexing between paratransit and microtransit based on demand.
   • While an individual vehicle operates as paratransit or demand-response during a given driver shift, the proportion of vehicles assigned to paratransit and microtransit can change with demand.
3. Commingled driver shifts, so that the same drivers carry paratransit and microtransit passengers within a given shift.
   • Paratransit and microtransit riders are not on board the vehicle at the same time.
   • The approach optimizes the fleet and aggregates riders by slotting route-compatible on-demand trips in between pre-scheduled paratransit trips.
4. Commingled trips, with passengers from both paratransit and microtransit services onboard a vehicle at the same time.
   • Commingling trips can achieve the greatest efficiency gains.

• Benefits of commingling:
  • Improved service experience
  • Lowered cost-per-trip

Comment

The article and research are based on a US context where on-demand and paratransit providers are often the same organisation, allowing easier commingling.

In other jurisdictions, community transport organisations are separate from on-demand service operators, complicating commingling. They are also often funded by different levels of government, adding an additional layer of complication.

However, commingling offers significant benefits to users, taxpayers, and the overall transport system, provided organisational boundaries can be removed.

It is also worth noting that some paratransit operators have also integrated with ride-hailing services.

What Next?

Have you set up a clear path towards commingling on-demand and community transport (and potentially ride-hailing services too)?

Quick Adventures in Transport Wonderland

Here is what else I came across this week:

• ​Basics: Sorting Out Rail-Bus Differences - The Human Transit blog deals with some misconceptions about the difference between rail and buses.
• ​An appreciation of Auckland - A blog about how Auckland has transformed its public transport over the last thirty or so years.
• ​Subways are costing even more than we think - A blog arguing that although the Anglosphere's metro costs look terrible, they are actually worse than that, when we take into account capacity as well.

Jobs

Jobs for Transport Leaders

​Here is a link with jobs around the world, specifically designed for transport leader readers. Use the filter to find jobs that match what you are looking for.