Is telecommuting on the rise?

Ever heard of telecommuting? It's just a fancy way of describing how people perform their office tasks and duties at home instead of commuting to work. With the rise of information technology and communications technology, more and more employees (in the United States) are doing jobs that used to require being in the office from their own homes. For those living in the suburbs, telecommuting is great because it saves them their 1-2 hour commute to work everyday.

The New Geography blog provides an overview of telecommuting in the US along with data comparing telecommuting rates to transit commuters over the past nine years. Specifically, the article provides data to show increases in telecommuting and transit in American cities from 2000 to 2009. It's a really informative article but I wonder if the analysis controls for unemployment over time. Unemployment in the US has increased in the past three years which can directly affect the number of trips a person makes to work. Anyway, that's just a methodological side note.

From the article:

"In 2009, 1.7 million more employees worked at home than in 2000. This represents a 31% increase in market share, from 3.3 percent to 4.3 percent of all employment. Transit also rose, from 4.6% to 5.0%, an increase of 9%".

"In five metropolitan areas, the increase was between 70% and 80% (Richmond, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Raleigh, Jacksonville and Orlando). Only five metropolitan areas experienced market share increases less than 20% (New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Rochester, Buffalo and Oklahoma City). Nonetheless, the rate of increase in the work at home market share exceeded that of transit in 49 of the 52 major metropolitan areas. Transit's increase was greater only in Washington, Seattle and Nashville".

Why are more people telecommuting these days? One major reason is the rise in oil prices. Commuting for 2 hours everyday is not only expensive in terms of fuel consumption, but can be exhausting to an already stressed and over-worked employee. While there are drawbacks of telecommuting (working at home means decreased face-to-face interaction among employees, isolation of employee from workplace can lead to negative or unproductive activities, distractions etc) it is becoming a more interesting and researched topic in the transportation and planning areas. Traffic congestion in many North American cities is egregious; this has only exacerbated commuting times and air pollution -telecommuting is seen as a partial solution to this.

Telecommuting has even more potential to grow in North American cities. I am not too sure how common it is in Vancouver or Toronto, but I think it will become more popular as industries recognize the energy use reductions and cost-effectiveness of this phenomenon. Telecommuting might serve as interim process of adapting to climate change and the rising costs of oil. Indeed, it may justify the expansion of the commercial, financial and information technology sectors to open offices in the suburbs to provide jobs closer to where people are living. But, increasingly, more and more people are moving out of the suburbs back to the inner cities (I don't have data to support this particular claim, but the data is out there). If telecommuting does not bring about more industries in the suburbs, it can still result in reductions of hundreds of thousands of carbon dioxide emissions due to the number of cars taken of the road. This can alleviate harmful pollutants and improve the quality of our air.

Key Message: Telecommuting is on the rise in the U.S. (and potentially in Canada too). It can reduce the number of cars on our highways and thereby reduce per capita energy consumption and traffic congestion -both of which are sustainable. However, it can also lead to decreased social capital (if you think about it) as we advance into a more cyberspace world communicating via blackberries and computers instead of face-to-face.