A perceptual assessment towards telecommuting and its implications on commute travel

Abstract

The study focussed on exploring the implications of telecommuting on commute travel in Kuala Lumpur City Centre. In most city centres, commute travel often contributes to the peak hour traffic congestion. It was identified that major roads leading to Kuala Lumpur city centre during peak hours are over-saturated. Centralised business activities and high dependency on private vehicles are among the main factors. Based on the review of the literature, telecommuting is able to provide a substitute for the commute travel and to mitigate the traffic congestion if practiced at a full scale. Telecommuting allows employees work from home or from a designated teleworking centre instead of commuting into a central office. The primary survey revealed the perceptions of employees on travel characteristics, preference to telecommuting and several factors regarding the adoption of telecommuting. Method of analysis used was descriptive analysis such as frequency distribution, crosstabulation, mean and statistical testing such as chi-square, correlation and Friedman. As expected, driving alone to the workplace was the most preferred mode of transport (48%). It was also revealed that more than half of the respondents felt stressed while commuting to work (54%). Accordingly, traffic congestion was reported as the main cause. The preference to practice telecommuting revealed that 50% of the respondents have shown a strong preference. Three main motivators towards the inclination of practicing telecommuting were “ability to reduce the stress of travelling to work”, “having more time to spend with the family” and “increased job satisfaction.” On the other hand, the three main obstacles were “lack of social interaction with other colleagues”, “increased home utility bills” and “lack of resources to accomplish work task remotely”. The estimation on the reduction of commute trips by private vehicles revealed that a reduction of 0.20 million (0.28%) in 2005, 0.67 million (0.79%) in 2010 and 1.91 million (2.1%) in 2015 will be achieved for the existing case with telecommuting frequency of one day per week. The estimated savings in VKMT for the existing case with one telecommuting day per week was projected to be approximately 5.3 million km (0.28%) in 2005, 17.45 million km (0.79%) in 2010, and 49.60 million km in 2015 (2.09%). The reduction in commute trips and savings in VKMT would subsequently increase as the frequency of telecommuting days increased. Hence, a maximum reduction in commute trips and savings in VKMT would possibly be achieved with maximum practice of telecommuting.