Mobile phones and telecommuting: Effects on trips and tours of Londoners
Grace Uayan Padayhag
Tokyo Institute of Technology
Jan-Dirk Schmöcker
Kyoto University
Daisuke Fukuda
Tokyo Institute of Technology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.v4i3.200
Keywords:
travel behavior, land use, mobile phone, telecommuting
Abstract
This study contributes to the existing literature on the travel behavioural 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 PC. The data used in this study is taken from the London Area Travel Survey 2001, providing us with a large sample size of 87,148 trips. The results of our descriptive and multivariate regression analysis imply that mobile phone possession significantly and positively affects total trips made though not necessarily tour complexity. Our study provides good evidence that mobile phone possession is clearly associated to total tours made. Though telecommuting does decrease work trips, other trips like shopping or leisure trips are likely to increase. We provide further evidence that it is the simple home-work-home tours which decrease through telecommuting and which 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 leisure trips and tour complexity but not on the number of work or shopping trips.
Author Biographies
Grace Uayan Padayhag, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Graduate Student
Department of Civil Engineering
College of Engineering
Tokyo Institute of Technology
Jan-Dirk Schmöcker, Kyoto University
Associate professor, Department of Urban Management
Daisuke Fukuda, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Associate professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
