Examining the Interplay of Parking, Working from Home, and Travel Behavior

Research Lead: Michael Manville

UC Campus(es): UCLA

Problem Statement: As the COVID-19 pandemic ends, policymakers are pondering the future of commuting. The pandemic led to a surge in telework and a concomitant reduction in vehicle miles traveled (VMT), air pollution, and congestion. Will the pandemic’s gradual end see the surge in telework end as well, and thus also curtail its attendant benefits? Are there ways to recover some of the travel-related benefits California saw during the pandemic, even as the economy returns to full steam? These questions are difficult to answer, in part because it is not clear that more telework leads to less total vehicle travel, and in part because the primary factors that determine whether someone teleworks—the type of job they have and their employers’ policies about work schedules—lie largely beyond policymakers’ control. There are, however, some potential policy actions that the state could take to encourage more work from home when it is feasible to do so.

Project Description: This project draws on the 2010-2012 California Household Travel Survey (CHTS) to revisit the potential of parking policy to influence travel behavior. Across thousands of users and a broad spectrum of built environments, the CHTS records if a given trip used parking, if the driver paid for it and (if they did) its price, if the parking was on or off-street, and so on. Specifically, the project team analyzed the associations between parking availability and decisions to work from home, drive, and use public transportation were analyzed. The data confirms something that has long been anecdotally intuitive, but never empirically verified that the vast majority of California vehicle trips end in a parking space, and most of those spaces, both on- and off-street, are unpriced. The project team also estimated regressions demonstrating that, even controlling for a host of other factors, the presence of free parking is strongly associated with more vehicle ownership, more driving, and less transit use.

Status: In Progress

Budget: $37,510