One option is road-pricing reform – a user-pays system. Strategies to limit car use in peak periods If this occurs, we may have to find other ways to contain this increase in car use if we want to keep those shorter commutes.Ĭars rule as coronavirus shakes up travel trends in our cities Even congestion itself may bother us less. If we commute for only three or four days a week, rather than five, we may be more tolerant of the costs associated with driving, such as parking fees and tolls. ![]() For example, we might move more permanently to using private cars for commuting (even once COVID safety issues subside). So why isn't it top of the agenda?Īs more of us spend fewer days commuting, there are risks. People love the idea of 20-minute neighbourhoods. These adjustments align well with the concept of the 20- or 30-minute city, a strategy many Australian city planners are grappling with. What’s more, doing so brings other benefits: in addition to myriad environmental benefits, our increased ability to work from home will open up new opportunities for revitalising suburbia. They need to publicly support working from home as a way of reducing pressure on transport networks, especially in our big cities.Ģ020 has proven traffic congestion can be reduced without building more roads. Early signs, including from our surveys in September, suggest many people in certain occupations are likely to work from home one to two days a week in the future, with full employer support.īut to really capture the benefits of this welcome shift on our roads, we need governments to play a role. But we believe we’ll still be left with a significant improvement on pre-COVID congestion. Of course, now that full-time working from home is easing for many, we don’t expect this level of benefit to be sustained. If more of us work from home after coronavirus we'll need to rethink city planning If demand can be flattened, as the data suggest it can be, then the implications for transport planning priorities will be significant. This is important, since infrastructure and service capacity are typically determined by peak demand. Our data show the increase in working from home is spread evenly across the five weekdays. ![]() Transport planning priorities will changeĬongestion shows us working from home is changing more than the workplace: it could have profound implications for road investment and transport policy. If we weren’t stuck in traffic, what else might we do with that time? And just how much is it worth to us? It’s possible to calculate how much these kinds of shifts are worth to us as a society. That’s similar to traffic during school holidays.ĬOVID-19, it turns out, has done something that nobody in government has been able to achieve – cutting road congestion almost overnight. We found a 10-15% drop in peak-period congestion. We began looking at the impacts of the increase in working from home on our roads and public transport from March to September. ![]() The increase in working from home turns out to be the best policy lever the transport sector has ever pulled for reducing traffic congestion in our cities.Īustralian city workers' average commute has blown out to 66 minutes a day. Commuting times are one winner, particularly in larger cities. Then COVID happened.Īlthough the pandemic has forced change without choice on almost all of us, there have been some positive unintended consequences. In 2019, the average daily commute time for Australian metro workers was 66 minutes. ![]() But, while we might not like it, more of us are doing it. As almost anyone who wastes countless hours stuck in traffic would agree, there’s little more frustrating for workers than starting or ending the day with an overly long commute.
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