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The effects of teleworking on commuting patterns, modelled for the city of Almere.

Kroep, Thijs (2022) The effects of teleworking on commuting patterns, modelled for the city of Almere.

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Abstract:In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic reached the Netherlands, and the Dutch government took measures to contain the infection rate. One of those measures was the (strict) advice to work from home. Although some people were already working from home before these measures were implemented, many people did not have (much) experience working from home. The COVID-19 pandemic thus showed opportunities to include teleworking in the working behaviour of people. An increase in teleworking could also have effects on commuting patterns and traffic intensities. The existing literature examined the development of teleworking during the pandemic and determined which characteristics caused people to work from home. However, not much was known about how teleworking would develop after the pandemic and which effects it could have on traffic intensities and commuting patterns when no advice to work from home is in place. The development of teleworking and its effects after the pandemic can be estimated using traffic models. In this study the ‘Multimodal traffic model Almere’ built in the Traffic modelling software OmniTRANS Expert is used to determine the effects of teleworking on traffic intensities and commuting patterns. The city of Almere is chosen because it is a city with a lot of transportation movements and is moreover closely located to cities such as Amsterdam and Utrecht, which makes Almere a ideal city to examine in- and outgoing commuting traffic. In this research, the following research question has been formulated: What are the estimated effects of teleworking on traffic intensities and commuting patterns for residents of Almere and how can these effects be modelled? This research is divided into three separate parts, in which analyses are performed that contribute to answering the research question. Firstly, teleworking and commuting behaviour before, during and after the pandemic was analysed to get an insight into the effects of the pandemic on teleworking. GPS data on transportation trips was retrieved from the NVP panel to perform this analysis. Commuting trips during twenty selected weeks before, during and after the pandemic were investigated. According to the results of this analysis, teleworking numbers increased strongly during the first weeks of the pandemic. In this period, between 50 and 55 per cent of the working days were performed from home. In the weeks after, the teleworking numbers weakened slightly to around 40 per cent. However, working from home remained on this level even after the pandemic faded and the measures were lifted. This indicates that people are willing to work from home even if there are no restrictions. Secondly, it is analysed which people are working from home in the period after the pandemic. It is therefore determined which individual characteristics have an influence on teleworking and mode choice. Additional survey data on the same members of the NVP panel was used to gather information on individual characteristics of the persons making the trips. This step is divided into three separate parts for which each a regression analysis is performed. The first regression analysis is performed to determine the influence of individual characteristics on the probability that a person works from home in the analysed weeks after the pandemic. In the second regression analysis, the influence of individual characteristics on the change in the telework probability between the beginning of the pandemic and after all measures were lifted is examined. The third regression analysis determines the influence of individual characteristics on mode choice. For the first two analyses, a censored regression is performed, while the last is an multinomial regression analysis.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:ET: Engineering Technology
Subject:56 civil engineering
Programme:Civil Engineering and Management MSc (60026)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/93845
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