Network Dependency of Person-Level Trip Generation Rates in Cases of Work from Home

As a side effect of the precautionary measures implemented during the COVID-19 crisis, employees have gained greater discretion in deciding on appropriate work from home arrangements. Workplace accessibility, particularly for commuters without full car availability, exerts an influence on work trip production levels, thus calling the often-assumed invariance of person-level (compulsory) trip generation rates to networks into question. This may necessitate a back-coupling path of the transport level of service to the trip generation stage, often omitted in practice. Motivated by the identification of necessary post-pandemic adjustments to existing passenger transport models, this paper accentuates these new conditions that may possibly magnify the comparatively small but still measurable effects of accessibility on trip rates. To establish these points, the current literature is examined and two German national household travel surveys, one cross-sectional and one longitudinal, are once again analyzed from this aspect. It emerges that the supply side influence on the proliferating telework modulates per-capita trip rates, whereas ambiguous results are obtained on the compensatory generation of trips for other purposes that keeps the overall trip rate largely constant. The findings and effort-benefit considerations suggest that the non-negligible network influence on WFH should be addressed. A solution for operationalizing bidirectional supply-demand interdependencies within the four-step model sequence is proposed.