Modeling the Travel Effects of Telework and Hybrid Work: Reshaping Duration, Distance, and Timing of Non-work Travel

Telework has historically been framed as a means to reduce traffic congestion and alleviate the environmental and energy use impact of transportation. The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a rapid and widespread shift to remote work, triggering a broad set of interconnected changes in travel behavior that extend well beyond commuting and continue to reshape daily activity patterns. In the contemporary labor market, hybrid work models have gained varied degrees of acceptance by employers and employees, prompting renewed interest in understanding their broader implications for individual behavior and system-level performance. Using activity diary data from 744 working adults in the United States, this study investigates the effects of telework and hybrid work on the duration, spatial extent, and temporal allocation of out-of-home non-work activities. A trivariate ordered probit model is estimated to jointly account for correlations across participation, duration, and distance, while a mixed logit model is used to examine the time-of-day choice. Findings reveal that telework and hybrid work influence not only commuting patterns but also the broader temporal and spatial organization of daily activities. Teleworkers are less likely to participate in out-of-home non-work activities, spend less time on them, and travel shorter distances. Moreover, telework redistributes non-work activities toward the late morning and early afternoon, while hybrid work produces distinct evening peaks. These behavioral shifts have meaningful consequences for demand management, multimodal planning, and the timing of peak loads, underscoring the need to incorporate evolving hybrid work patterns into travel behavior models and adapt assumptions used in forecasting and infrastructure design in the post-pandemic world.