The relationship between teleworking, traffic and air pollution

Özet

Traffic congestion is one of the foremost problems confronted by the urban and suburban tenants oftoday, which increases vehicle emissions and degrades air quality. Urban planners and policy makershave consequently been always investigating choices to alleviate traffic congestion and to enhance airquality. Teleworking is one option that has received significant consideration and has been studied in therecent past. The aim of the study is to explore the relationship between teleworking, air quality andtraffic in Switzerland. The analysis relies on panel individual and household level data over the period2002e2013. We examine five main air pollutants; the sulphur dioxide (SO2), the ground-level ozone (O3)the nitrogen dioxide (NO2), the carbon monoxide (CO) and the particulate matter less than 10 mm (PM10).Based on the fixed effects estimates, teleworking reduces traffic volume by 1.9 per cent. Furthermore, thereduction observed on air pollution is higher for NO2, CO and PM10 ranging between 3.3 and 3.7 per cent,followed by O3 at 2.3 per cent and SO2 at 2.1 per cent. According to instrumental variable (IV) approachand the two stage least squares (2SLS) method, the effect is higher ranging between 2.6 and 4.1 per cent.The respective reduction on traffic becomes 2.7 per cent. Overall, the main concluding remark of thestudy is that teleworking can be a promising tool for urban planning and development, focusing at thetraffic volume reduction, and the air quality improvement. We further discuss additional policy implicationsof teleworking and its beneficial effects for the society.