Mobile phones and telecommuting: Effects on trips and tours of Londoners

Abstract

This study contributes to the existing literature on the travel behavioral effects of mobile phone possession and telecommuting by investigating the effects of both and looking at average trips and tours per day as well as tour complexity. In contrast to other studies, we investigate the effects of “informal telecommuting,” defined as working from home on a personal computer. The data used in this study is taken from the London Area Travel Survey 2001, providing us with a large sample size of 27 634 individuals. The results of our descriptive and multivariate regression analysis imply that mobile phone possession significantly and positively affects total trips made, but does not necessarily affect tour complexity. Our study provides good evidence that mobile phone possession is clearly associated to total tours made. Though telecommuting does decrease the number of work trips, trips for other purposes (such as shopping or leisure) are likely to increase. We provide further evidence that it is the simple home-work-home tours that decrease through telecommuting and are replaced by other tour types, keeping the total tour numbers fairly constant. The effects are particularly pronounced for the part-time working population. Controlling for geographic characteristics, we further find that population density has an effect on the number of leisure trips and on tour complexity but not on the number of work or shopping trips.