Modelling the effects of factors on the stated preference towards telecommuting in IIUM campus, Gombak

ABSTRACT

The increase in number of private vehicles has not only taken place in central cities, but has also occurred in university campuses. High use of private vehicles by IIUM community is posing a strain on the ability of the existing road to cope with the increasing traffic volume and parking demand within the campus. Telecommuting is one of the Transportation Demand Management (TDM) measures that aimed at reducing peak hour traffic congestion by allowing commuters to work from home to save their driving time to work, and more importantly to eliminate some vehicle trips. The main objective of this paper is to estimate the effects of the factors on the choice of telecommuting. Three hundred respondents participated in this study through survey questionnaire, which has resulted in a response rate of 67.11%. Findings indicate that 29% and 19.2% of the academic and administrative staff preferred to telecommute, if they were given the option. Multinomial logistic regression was conducted to estimate the effects of socio-economic, trip and work related factors on the preference to telecommute. Parameter estimates on the administrative employees’ preference to telecommute indicate that number of young children, frequency of face-to-face communication and frequency of using email were significant factors in predicting whether an individual is more inclined to choose ‘definitely yes’ towards performing telecommuting as compared to ‘not at all’. As for academic employees, delay time (home-workplace), frequency of face-to-face communication, frequency of using fax machine, frequency of using email and frequency of using mobile network were significant predictors for the preference of ‘definitely yes’ towards telecommuting as compared to ‘not at all’.

KEYWORDS:

• Telecommuting
• telework
• transportation demand management
• peak period traffic

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the Research Management Centre of International Islamic University Malaysia for providing research fund for this project under project ID EDW B11-192-0670. The findings of this paper were presented at the 14th World Conference on Transport Research which was held at Shanghai, China in 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by International Islamic University Malaysia [grant number EDW B11-192-0670].