Lead Presenter Biography

Aupal Mondal is a Ph.D. student in the Transportation Engineering program at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Master’s degree in Transportation Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay prior to joining UT Austin. While at UT, he also received his second Master’s degree in Economics in 2021. His research interests lie in the areas of econometric modeling, discrete choice models, travel and consumer behavior, machine learning methods, and future implications of autonomous vehicles.

Co-Authors

Presentation Description

There is wide consensus today that telework adoption will be more prevalent than pre-COVID days, based on a lower resistance to telework from employers and pandemic-based employee experiences of a remote work location. In this emerging new landscape, how the telework-commute distance relationship is being reshaped is of interest to not only transportation professionals, but also urban and land-use planners, geographers, labor market researchers, and those in the air quality and environmental fields. This is particularly so because of three distinct teleworking differences from the pre-COVID period. First, telework has changed from a predominantly occasional work-from-home instance (which led to the consideration of telework as a simple binary distinction of whether an individual teleworks at all or not in pre-COVID studies) to telework as an element of a routine hybrid work arrangement (which demands the consideration of work place location today as a multiple discrete variable with different numbers of work days from different locations over a specified time period). Second, while home was the principal telework location in pre-COVID days, we have the emergence today of a third work place (such as a café, a hotel room, or even a beach front) as another increasingly embraced remote telework location. Third, COVID has arguably strengthened the interplay between telework and commute distance (commute distance here refers to the home-work office distance). After all, telework is now on the radar of, and much more accessible to, most employees (compared to pre-COVID days). Thus, it is more important than ever today to consider telework intensities and commute distances as a joint package impacted by observed as well as unobserved individual personality/lifestyle characteristics. After accommodating such observed and unobserved characteristics, there yet may be a “true” causal effect within the context of a joint package decision. For example, the decision to telework more may lead to longer commute distances because the commute is experienced less frequently. Alternatively, employees already residing far away from their work office may embrace teleworking with high intensity. In other words, is teleworking choice impacting commute length or is commute length impacting teleworking? Or perhaps the first directionality holds for some individuals and the second for other individuals?

In this study, we model the telework-commute length decision process as a package choice. Telework adoption and intensity is modeled through the number of workdays in a month of working from home, from the work office, and from a variable third work place location (WPL). The data for the analysis is drawn from a 2022 survey of Texan workers who have a designated work office site and have the option of working away from the work office. The modeling methodology, a first in the literature, combines a multiple discrete-continuous probit (MDCP) model for telework adoption/intensity with a log-linear regression model for commute distance. A host of exogenous variables are considered, including sociodemographic characteristics, work-related and occupation characteristics, commute patterns, and built environment variables of both the residence and out-of-home workplace. 

Presentation File