UC Irvine

The ongoing health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and the imposed social distancing measures have led a significant portion of workers to adopt “working from home” arrangements, which have greater impacts on workers’ daily activity-travel routines. This new-normal arrangement will possibly be sustained in large measure since the pandemic returns at a certain interval with its new variants. This study explores the activity patterns of workers exclusively working from home (telecommuters) after the initial 2020 pandemic year and deemed as “the 2021 post-vaccine” year. We hypothesized that heterogeneous groups of activity patterns (daily sequence of activities and travel) exist among telecommuters. We classified the activity patterns of telecommuters via Latent Class Analysis. Our model results suggest that telecommuters’ activity patterns can be split into three distinct classes where each class is associated with several socio-demographics. Class 1 constituted workers from high-income households who tend to have a conventional work schedule but make non-work activities mostly in the evening. Class 2 was composed of workers from low to medium income, non-Asian households whose work is not pre-dominate but with out of home non-work activities spread throughout the day. Last, Class 3 members are workers of middle to older age, living without children, who primarily remain at home during the day with a conventional work schedule. If telecommuting is to continue at levels much greater than prior to the pandemic, then research insights regarding the variations of activity-travel demands of telecommuters could help to make telecommuting a successful travel demand management tool.