Abstract
e advance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has changed travellers’
appreciation of travel distance in various ways. In the context of telecommuting, ICT increasingly allows
us to work from home one or more days per week. One hypothesis that has been put forward
is that because ICTs reduce the frequency of commuting,
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it allows workers to accept longer commute
distances, implying that telecommuters have a different valuation of travel distance than regular commuters
and would also favour more peripheral residential locations. e question can be raised, however,
whether telecommuters can be regarded as a homogeneous group with respect to their valuation
of commute distance and residential preferences. To investigate the heterogeneity of commuters’ and
telecommuters’ preferences, latent class discrete choice models of workers’ intended relocation probability
and preferred residential environment were estimated. e results suggest that telecommuting is
not a factor that can be used to identify segments with different residential preferences. However, within
the group of telecommuters, two different classes can be identied, which can be characterised as being
sensitive and insensitive to commute distance.e advance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has changed travellers’
appreciation of travel distance in various ways. In the context of telecommuting, ICT increasingly allows
us to work from home one or more days per week. One hypothesis that has been put forward
is that because ICTs reduce the frequency of commuting, it allows workers to accept longer commute
distances, implying that telecommuters have a different valuation of travel distance than regular commuters
and would also favour more peripheral residential locations. e question can be raised, however,
whether telecommuters can be regarded as a homogeneous group with respect to their valuation
of commute distance and residential preferences. To investigate the heterogeneity of commuters’ and
telecommuters’ preferences, latent class discrete choice models of workers’ intended relocation probability
and preferred residential environment were estimated. e results suggest that telecommuting is
not a factor that can be used to identify segments with different residential preferences. However, within
the group of telecommuters, two different classes can be identied, which can be characterised as being
sensitive and insensitive to commute distance.
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