Assessment of Potential Effect on Travel of Telecommuting in Singapore

Recently, there has been an increased interest in telecommuting in Singapore. A survey of 630 companies indicated that although only 1.7 percent have a formal telecommuting arrangement, 3.6 percent plan to introduce it in the near future and an additional 21.6 percent would like to explore the concept. Singapore has many of the prerequisites for telecommuting to become popular: a high and growing proportion of information workers, an excellent telecommunications infrastructure, and a large installed base of personal computers. To assess the potential effects of telecommuting, a stratified travel demand analysis was performed by using travel characteristics specific to different groups of information workers. The results indicate that a considerable reduction in vehicle trips to work can be achieved if telecommuting becomes more popular. The potential reduction is up to 4.9 percent in the year 2005 and up to 11.2 percent in 2010. The corresponding savings in distance traveled are in the range of 512 000 to 1 309 000 vehicle-km. Although these predictions have a high degree of uncertainty, they indicate that telecommuting has a potential to provide significant travel reduction benefits in Singapore and should be used as a travel demand management tool.