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Two traditional questions on the relationships between telecommuting, job and residential location, and household travel: revisited using a path analysis

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Abstract

This study aims to provide empirical evidence for two traditional research questions in the field of telecommuting studies: (1) Does telecommuting promotes dispersion of urban space? (2) Does telecommuting substitute for household travel? Although these causality issues have received great deal of attention, no multivariate analysis approaches exist. Using the 2006 household travel survey data from the Seoul Metropolitan Area, this study adopts a path analysis to discover the complex relationships between telecommuting, residential/job locations, and household travel. First, the path analysis shows that rather than telecommuting serving as the determinant of location choice, job locations determine the choice to telecommute. Hence, secondary impacts of telecommuting on travel may not occur with location changes as the medium. Second, the analysis also shows that the household head’s telecommuting has a positive influence on his/her non-commuting travel in both the person kilometers traveled (PKT) and vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) models and on household members’ travel in VKT models. Moreover, the VKT model suggests that the household head’s non-commuting travel has a negative impact on the household members’ travel. These results indicate that although telecommuting reduces commute travel, this may be offset by other travel demand within the household, owing to exhaustion of the limited travel budget. Thus, planners and policymakers must consider these impacts when evaluating the benefits and costs of telecommuting as an urban management policy.

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Notes

  1. These papers are based on the same survey data and geographical boundaries with this paper. But, the specific data set and methodologies applied are different from one another according to their different research questions.

  2. We also tested simpler models that excluded the travel variables, but we decided to apply the current structure as the models were saturated.

  3. Due to analytical errors, we did not considered reciprocal paths in Sect. 4. However, such analytical errors were not found in Sect. 5.

  4. We also analyzed this alternative model, but its goodness of fit was found to be remarkably lower than that of the other models.

  5. Household members’ travel variable is not divided by the number of household members in order to reconcile one unit of the two travel-related endogenous variables.

  6. The full results of the RHMs are available from authors upon request.

  7. In Sect. 5, the travel-related variables were rescaled in 10 km units for minimizing iterations (Muthén and Muthén 2007).

  8. The empirical setting of this paper focuses on the intra-household interactions in travel rather than overall impact of telecommuting. To draw a more precise estimate of the overall impact, household-level analyses should be performed (Kim et al. 2015). Because this approach needs comprehensive changes in the empirical setting, this issue will be addressed through future research.

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Acknowledgments

The comments of the anonymous reviewers have substantially improved this paper. I would like to express our deepest thanks to them. This research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2012R1A1A2009216), and also partially supported by the Architecture and Urban Research Institute.

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  1. Architecture and Urban Research Institute, 701, 194 Jeolje-ro, Sejong-si, 30103, Republic of Korea

    Seung-Nam Kim

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Correspondence to Seung-Nam Kim.

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Kim, SN. Two traditional questions on the relationships between telecommuting, job and residential location, and household travel: revisited using a path analysis. Ann Reg Sci 56, 537–563 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-016-0755-8

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