Impacts of teleworking and online shopping on travel: a tour-based analysis

Large-scale adoption of telemobility, such as teleworking and online shopping, has affected travel patterns significantly. The impacts of teleworking and online shopping on travel have been studied separately and with trip-level analyses, thereby ignoring tour complexity, trip chaining, and activity scheduling. We aim to address this gap by investigating the interactions between online shopping, teleworking, and travel at a tour level, considering trip chaining and the importance of the activities involved. We classify tours into mandatory (e.g., travel for work, school), maintenance (e.g., travel for grocery shopping, appointments, errands), and discretionary (e.g., travel for non-grocery shopping, leisure, religious activities) tours according to the primary activity purpose. We then estimate a structural equation model using a one-week activity-travel diary from the 2019 Puget Sound Regional Travel Study. The results indicate that teleworking reduced mandatory and maintenance tours while increasing online shopping. Mandatory tours were negatively associated with both maintenance tours and online shopping, whereas the number of maintenance tours was positively associated with the number of discretionary tours. We did not find a statistically significant relationship between online shopping, maintenance tours, and discretionary tours. Overall, this study offers new insights into the effect of teleworking and online shopping on travel, with potential implications for travel demand modeling and management, as well as for the design of travel surveys that take such virtual activities into account.