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438 TELECOMMUTING ANDTELEWORKemployees occupy the space on different days. Many of
these centers were shut down soon after the initial sub-
sidies phased down (or out), because of low usage of the
facilities (Mokhtarian, 1996), and most of the rest are now
gone.
“After-hours telecommuting” refers to employees us-
ing computers and telecommunications equipment, al-
most always in their own homes, to perform organiza-
tional work after (and possibly before) typical office hours.
The word telecommuting is arguably a misnomer here,
because this telework does not reduce traffic volumes on
the transportation system.
Some employees may be able to use their home-
computer capabilities to rationalize reducing or chang-
ing their hours in the office, thereby shifting their morn-
ing or evening commuting (or both) away from the most
congested times. Such “part-day telecommuting” can re-
duce commuting times for individual employees, as well
as reducing congestion and air pollution resulting from
slower moving vehicles during the critical peak hours. Ar-
rangements like this could also help organizations comply
with traffic mitigation requirements. This is contingent on
the requirements recognizing this approach, however, and
on the incentives or sanctions being sizable enough to
compensate organizations for the reduced face-to-face
availability of some of their employees.
To the extent that they use information and communi-
cations technologies (ICT) to keep in contact with their
organizations, people who work primarily at different
locations or operate transportation vehicles are telework-
ers. Such “mobile workers” include field sales and cus-
tomer service representatives, transportation operatives
(e.g., truck and cab drivers), consultants working at client
facilities, and so on. There are other workers who have
offices in traditional organizational locations but actu-
ally average 20% or more of their time outside of their
buildings. Many of these employees also use information
and communications technologies extensively when out
of their offices and thus represent part-time mobile work-
ers. The technologies mobile workers use are similar to
those used by conventional telecommuters, except that
wireless communications usually replace hardwired net-
works, and miniaturized devices (cell phones, personal
digital assistants, laptop computers) are often used in
place of their larger desktop counterparts.
Self-employed workers who work out of their homes re-
ally don’t commute at all and thus should not be counted
as telecommuters. Some of these “home workers” use the
Internet extensively for research or communications with
suppliers whose products or services they use to gener-
ate their own value-added outputs for their customers.
Others are contract employees (e.g., computer program-
mers) who may work some assignments on site but han-
dle others in a home worker mode by using the Internet
to interface with the computers of the companies they
work for. Therefore, home workers who use computers
and the Internet in their activities are included among
the ranks of teleworkers even though they don’t really
telecommute.
Electronic commerce represents another form of sub-
stitution of information and communications technolo-
gies for transportation. Although not a form of telework,e-commerce delivers goods to customers by mail or
package delivery services. Thus e-commerce can replace
vehicle trips—typically in low-occupancy vehicles going to
one or a few scattered stops—with deliveries by carriers
that service large numbers of locations via efficient rout-
ing. Customers handling banking transactions via home
computers rather than traveling to their branches also re-
duces vehicle trips. Thus, increasing use of e-commerce
also provides traffic and emission-reduction benefits.
The phrasevirtual organizationis applied to organi-
zations that interface components of separate and dis-
tinct organizations for varying lengths of time to achieve
specific objectives. The use of information and commu-
nications technologies makes it possible to coordinate
between the organizations with less travel than would
otherwise be required. In terms of surface vehicle travel,
however, such reductions are typically small. For such
ventures, the more important impact of information and
communications technologies is to enable profitable al-
liances that otherwise would be more difficult because of
the distances involved (e.g., short-term international joint
ventures).IMPLICATIONS OF TELECOMMUTING
DEFINITIONS
Transportation planners and legislators are most inter-
ested in forms of telework that reduce peak-hour vehicle
traffic volumes, either by reducing the amount of com-
muting (“classic telecommuting”), or by shifting some of
it to off-peak times (“part-day telecommuting”). Reducing
traffic obviously reduces air pollution and dependence on
imported petroleum. Commuting at off-peak hours also
helps somewhat, through the increased efficiency of auto-
mobile engines as a result of less stop-and-go driving.
On the other hand, organizations typically do not
encourage either of these approaches because they re-
duce the proportion of regular working hours that office
workers spend in their buildings. They are often willing,
however, to allow one or both of these types of telecom-
muting on a case-by-case basis, where they make it pos-
sible to achieve other important objectives. A common
rationale is retaining a valuable employee who might oth-
erwise be unable to continue to work for the organization
because of health issues or a relocation of either the family
or the organization.
Organizations are the most interested in telework when
it helps attain financial and other objectives. This typ-
ically occurs in situations in which, because of the re-
quirements of their jobs, employees must work outside
of an office to handle a significant portion or most of
their responsibilities. In many “mobile work” situations,
organizations have no choice but to allow off-site work
and are therefore concerned with maintaining optimal
communications with their remote employees, for exam-
ple, for scheduling work, routing employees most effi-
ciently to reduce costs, improving response times, and so
forth.
For many information workers, after-hours telecom-
muting is becoming an unwritten requirement of their
jobs. Unlike classic or part-day telecommuting, it does not
reduce the face-to-face accessibility of employees during