Post-COVID: More Driving, Less AM Congestion

A recent survey from PriceWaterhouseCooper found that the majority of office workers want to continue working at home at least three days a week after the pandemic, and most employers are likely to let them do so. In fact, a higher percentage of employers — 83 percent vs. only 71 percent of workers — think that remote working during the pandemic has proven successful.

Data collected by Streetlight, which tracks people’s cell phones, reveals that the large numbers of people working at home has nearly eliminated the morning rush hour. However, the afternoon rush hour remains and is in many places worse than before. Before the pandemic, San Francisco had an afternoon peak that lasted from 4 to 6 pm. By June, 2020, the peak began around noon and lasted until 5.

Notice that these graphs show the percentage of daily travel, not total travel. Since total travel in June 2020 was less than June 2019, the afternoon peak period was not as severe in 2020 as it had been before the pandemic. But that could change as the economy recovers if total miles of travel return to close to 100 percent of what they were in 2019.

Two decades ago, researchers monitoring telecommuting concluded that it would reduce overall driving, if by only a small amount. More recent research, however, found that telecommuters ended up driving a lot more than people who worked at a worksite: a study based on 2009 data found that people who worked at home were 27 percent more likely to drive more than 20,000 miles a year. A study based on 2017 data concluded that people working at home drove an average of 37 percent more miles per year.

One reason telecommuters drive more is they tend to live further away from work, so when they do drive to a workplace, they travel more miles. But in addition, one study found, “a high percentage [of telecommuters] travel to a variety of locations to either visit customers and/or use their spatio-temporal schedule flexibility to perform work tasks from locations other than home.” In other words, they go to coffee shops, parks, libraries, and other places where they can get some work done but also enjoy a change of scenery.
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Judging from the Streetlight traffic patterns, a lot of this travel takes place in the afternoons. Apparently, people are productive at home in the mornings, but get an itch to go somewhere else in the afternoons.

Streetlight has also found that people have been moving to lower density areas. The firm added that “the denser a city, the more efficiently its inhabitants can move around” and so lower-density lifestyles may produce more greenhouse gas emissions. But that’s based on the oversimplified assumption that emissions are exactly proportional to miles of travel.

In fact, as described here previously, the Transportation Energy Data Book shows that cars in denser cities have slower average speeds and slower speeds translate to reduced gas mileage. The result is that people in dense cities like San Francisco may drive less yet their cars emit more greenhouse gases than people in low-density suburbs.

It appears that the coming years will see far more telecommuting and more per capita driving, but transportation-related carbon emissions may fall (or at least not significantly increase) because people will live in lower-density areas and get better gas mileage. Morning rush hour will be much less important but afternoon rush hour may be more serious than ever. Transit won’t help because people in low-density areas won’t find transit useful.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

5 Responses to Post-COVID: More Driving, Less AM Congestion

  1. LazyReader says:

    health crisis?
    Total infections were 147 million and 3.1 million deaths most of which were co-morbidity. Diarrhea and Malaria still kill millions worldwide. HIV/AIDS another 2 million, More people died from “The Shits” than corona

    Governments have always used “Disasters” to curtail human freedoms. Civil War, WWII, 9/11, Patriot Act.
    The end of the Cold War in 1990 presented a serious problem for the Military Complex. The threat of communism could no longer justify massive wartime military budgets and a worldwide system of military
    bases. It could no longer justify American military intervention to protect corporate interests whenever a nation’s political establishment threatened change. The easy profits from military contracts decreased as
    peace spread throughout the world. The solution was a propaganda campaign to replace the threat of communism with the threat of terrorism.

    Like Climate Change, Corona is far too profitable to simply “Solve” it’ll never be solved, it’s the new “War on….”

  2. prk166 says:

    Mass transit could work when there was mass manufacturing in a massive location. That’s long gone. And it’s small substitute, $100K office workers crammed into a downtown skyscraper appears to be gone, too.

  3. LazyReader says:

    Is there a reason we cant see comments anymore?

  4. Ted says:

    “the denser a city, the more efficiently its inhabitants can move around”

    Hilarious!

    Also, there’s something wrong with the site as there are four responses, but no comments are showing.

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