<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="https://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <channel>
    <title>Research in Progress (RIP)</title>
    <link>https://rip.trb.org/</link>
    <atom:link href="https://rip.trb.org/Record/RSS?s=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" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
    <description></description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <copyright>Copyright © 2026. National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.</copyright>
    <docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
    <managingEditor>tris-trb@nas.edu (Bill McLeod)</managingEditor>
    <webMaster>tris-trb@nas.edu (Bill McLeod)</webMaster>
    <image>
      <title>Research in Progress (RIP)</title>
      <url>https://rip.trb.org/Images/PageHeader-wTitle-RIP.jpg</url>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/</link>
    </image>
    <item>
      <title>Evaluating the Willingness to Pay for Managed Lanes (MLs)</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2563659</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This research project will investigate users’ willingness to pay to use managed lane (ML) facilities in light of the recent and rapidly shifting demographic trends and develop a better understanding on how recent mobility options, shifts in telework, online shopping adoption, and demographic and societal trends may have affected the preferences and choices toward using ML facilities.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Jun 2025 13:19:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2563659</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Time Use, Travel, and Telework Dashboard (T3D)</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2549439</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) provides an unparalleled wealth and breadth of insights into the daily lives of Americans, holding immense value for a wide range of disciplines, including transportation planning, economics, public policy, sociology, and urban planning. However, navigating the rich datasets of the ATUS is challenging for a broad spectrum of users, including policymakers, planners, researchers, and the general public. The complexity of ATUS data requires advanced analytical skills to extract insights, which constitutes a significant barrier for regular users. Moreover, even for experts equipped with these skills, the requirement for exhaustive and repetitive data analysis for each new inquiry becomes a significant burden. This complexity severely limits the broader application and utility of ATUS data. Motivated to address these barriers and contribute to the TBD Center’s larger Data Hub initiative, this project endeavors to develop a web-based data dashboard named the Time Use, Travel, and Telework Dashboard (T3D), aimed at democratizing ATUS data to make it more accessible and interpretable for everyone. T3D will offer instant insights into the time use, travel, and work arrangement patterns of Americans, covering data from the beginning of the ATUS series in 2003 to the present. Featuring three dedicated pages for detailed analysis of time use, travel, and telework, T3D will facilitate within-year, between-year, and cross-segment analyses effortlessly, leveraging various socio-demographic attributes for customized insights. The project will also investigate and employ effective data processing and visualization techniques to ensure the dashboard's efficiency and user-friendliness. Ultimately, T3D is envisioned to broaden the reach and impact of ATUS data, fostering interdisciplinary research and promoting evidence-based decision-making.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2025 16:06:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2549439</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>The Differential Accessibility Effects of Work from Home: Travel Behavior Outcomes and Transportation Equity Implications</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2519219</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Researchers have long highlighted the potential effects of telework on the geography of opportunity in metropolitan areas. Telework, despite increasing accessibility to certain job markets, can further cause employment and population to decentralize, facilitating a spatially dispersed pattern of metropolitan growth. This could exacerbate existing disparities and inequities, making it harder for disadvantaged and transit-dependent groups to access important opportunities. Similarly, the central city’s position in the geography of opportunity could continue to decline as jobs and services become more dispersed. Low-income and minority groups are likely disproportionately affected by the spatial reconfigurations caused by telecommunications.  However, the lack of spatially disaggregated empirical data has made it difficult to predict the relative contributions of geographic locations, transportation modes, and telecommunications capabilities in determining accessibility differentials.

The proposed research will address the following questions:

How does work-from-home differentially impact the geography of opportunity and accessibility of population groups for jobs and other services? How can accessibility measures be updated to reflect changes in work-from-home adoption, travel frequency, pattern, and mode choice? What are the impacts of differential accessibility on travel behavior outcomes of essential and non-essential workers? What are the desirable changes in public transit services and TDM policies to help the spatially disadvantaged, especially essential workers, to reduce the accessibility gaps?]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Mar 2025 11:35:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2519219</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Teleworking to Play or Playing to Telework? A Latent Segmentation Approach to Exploring the Relationship Between Telework and Nonwork Travel</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2519199</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Technology has evolved at a tremendous pace over the past decade, permeating into our everyday existence and affecting literally every aspect of our lives. Our activity-travel choices have been no exception in this regard, as we make continuous and joint decisions about which activities we can and want to undertake (either in-person or virtually). Add to this the pandemic’s upheaval of habits and behaviors, and there emerges a critical and renewed need to understand the activity-travel choices and decisions of individuals within a new landscape of transportation, technology, and pandemic-altered lifestyles. In this study, the research team explores the causal direction/jointness issue underlying the interplay of teleworking choice and nonwork travel, within the context of the telework landscape in the aftermath of the pandemic. In particular, the team models the telework frequency, maintenance stop frequency, and leisure stop frequency decision-making process as a package choice to account for unobserved factors, as well as use a latent segmentation approach to recognize the two possible and distinct causal behavioral directions that may be at play. The methodology combines an ordinal choice model for telework adoption/intensity with weekly count models for the number of maintenance and leisure stops. The data for the analysis is drawn from a 2021-2022 weekly travel diary and survey of Minnesotan workers.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Mar 2025 11:28:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2519199</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>The Effects of Changing Commutes on Home Delivery Activity</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2440043</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Since the COVID-19 pandemic, New York, like most US and global cities, has seen rapid evolution of (1) work location and time flexibility and (2) adoption of online shopping alternatives for diverse commodities by varying shopper populations.  It is expected that changes in work location – particularly the increased opportunity for some individuals to work from home at least a few days per week – could have profound impacts on the choice of location for shopping activities and on the likelihood of receiving home deliveries. 

Relying on the New York City Department of Transportation’s forthcoming 2022 Citywide Mobility Survey (CMS) and publicly-available land-use and employment data, this project will explicitly investigate the relationship between work-related travel activity (or lack thereof) and propensity for home delivery.  This study will distinguish individuals based on demographic characteristics, home and work built environments (e.g. land uses and building types) and commute characteristics (e.g. frequencies, modes, times of day), and will evaluate shopping frequencies for several specific categories of goods - including groceries, prepared food, and parcels. Results are expected to provide insights on the expected impacts of changing work on local delivery activity, to inform the design of future urban freight infrastructure and city logistics strategies in work- and residence-oriented communities, and to provide insights for potential implications for local travel and retail activity.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 13 Oct 2024 16:13:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2440043</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Trends in Time, Travel, Transit, Telework, and Treasure (T5)</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2440047</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The early 21st century to the present is a pivotal era in the study of travel behavior and time use. This two-decade period has witnessed not only incremental adjustments but also transformative shifts in how individuals allocate their time across various activities and make travel-related decisions within their time and monetary constraints. These shifts are not isolated phenomena; they are deeply intertwined with broader, multidimensional changes driven by factors such as the widespread adoption of Internet and Communication Technologies (leading to innovations in mobility services and online substitutes for many in-person activities) and shifts in demographics and cultural norms. Overall, this period of change holds profound implications for transportation planning and policy development. This multi-stage project aims to navigate this complex terrain to shed light on the trends in time, travel, transit, telework, and treasure (T5) during this period. The project will primarily utilize data from The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) to understand and analyze these trends. Understanding these trends is crucial for effectively addressing current and future challenges and seizing opportunities in transportation management, economic resilience, and societal wellbeing.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Oct 2024 17:06:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2440047</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Impacts of Remote/Hybrid Work and Remote Services on Activity and Transportation Patterns</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2313276</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This project will provide science‐based robust information on the behavioral impacts of information and communication technology (ICT) based remote activities on travel choices, including telework, hybrid work, and online shopping. The study will analyze data from the California Mobility Panel, which has been built with rounds of data collection in 2018, 2019, spring and fall 2020, 2021, and 2023, and will be complemented by a new round of data collection in fall 2024. With unique, rich panel data, the project will model complex relationships around remote activities in a single modeling framework, which examines cross‐domain and bidirectional causal effects. The project will employ robust analytical approaches to estimate the effects of remote activities on travel patterns under different land use configurations. The project will greatly improve the understanding of the impacts of remote/hybrid work and other remote services and inform State and planning agencies by shedding light on the complex ways remote activities affect short‐term daily routines (e.g., telecommuting vs. commuting trips, travel mode choice, and spatial/ temporal trip distributions) and long‐term choices (vehicle choice, residential location and real estate development), and will help understand the impacts on vehicle miles traveled (VMT).]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 21 Dec 2023 12:53:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2313276</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Quantifying the Influences of Telecommuting on Household Total Trips and VMT Generation</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2301336</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The Covid-19 pandemic, alongside changes in technology and shifts in the job market, has
led to increasing numbers of workers in the U.S. telecommuting, or ‘working from home.’ As
many workers and businesses shift to models allowing for some or all work to be carried out
off-site, traditional patterns of commuting are shifting, causing potentially widespread
impacts on all aspects of the transportation system. Much of the previously available data on
telecommuting classified workers as either fully remote or fully on-site. In the post-pandemic
economy, increasing numbers of workers are ‘hybrid’ telecommuters, working from home
part-time. While telecommuting provides workers with the ability to decrease VMT by
eliminating commutes, previous research has shown that in many cases those who work from
home actually generate more VMT than their counterparts, perhaps due in part to having
more time to generate non-work trips for leisure and other purposes. As telecommuting
becomes increasingly popular, understanding the broader impacts of this trend on travel
outcomes is necessary to allow for planning processes that limit VMT generation and its
negative social, environmental, and health effects, and to reassess transit systems to meet the
changing travel needs of the population.
Using a dataset from California, where a proliferation of high-tech companies and
industries allowed for the early adoption of telecommuting models, this research aims to
quantify the influences of telecommuting on household VMT generation and total trip generation. It
will advance the current understanding of the influences of telecommuting on VMT and
travel behavior usage in three ways. First, it will explore these influences at the household level with
precise locations of where people live to control for both sociodemographic characteristics
and neighborhood built environmental features. Second, it will employ a hierarchical two-stage modeling approach. Not only it is the appropriate method to analyze variables with
large numbers of zeros, such as transit trip counts, but also it can handle a nested data
structure and take spatial autocorrelation and heterogeneity into account. Third, this research
will use data from California, where most telecommuting started earlier than elsewhere. That
gives a longer time for the impacts of telecommuting to be felt.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Nov 2023 15:55:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2301336</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>The Impact of Children's School Format on Women Professionals in STEM</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2244203</link>
      <description><![CDATA[With many school closures during the pandemic resulting in long-term changes (more than just a month) to child education format (e.g., online or hybrid), many women took on increasingly greater home and childcare responsibilities. Even prior to the pandemic, the retention of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faced many challenges. The research project described herein tried to capture the experiences of women in STEM with children, as (rather than in retrospect) they navigated various school formats during the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). The authors anticipate that the results of this research will highlight the challenges facing women in STEM with children when it comes to the education of their children. Three surveys were administered to women in STEM: one in October of 2020, one in March of 2021, and one in May of 2021. Forty-six, ten and three survey respondents replied to each survey. The results suggest that while overall survey respondents remained concerned about impacts that COVID-19 may have on them and their families, the level of concern seemed to dissipate over the successive surveys. Overall, women in STEM reported very limited options for additional support (e.g., a nanny). The hybrid school format was reported as requiring some of the most significant levels of support followed by online and then in-person. As a whole, women in STEM whose children were attending school in-person reported little to no impacts, often instead remarking on impacts felt during the initial lockdowns. Women in STEM with elementary school-aged children seemed to report the most significant impact. The inability to work uninterrupted was one of the most significant challenges suggested, as there are implications that the work that women in STEM are conducting requires periods of meta focus. Therefore, while the flexibility of allowing women in STEM to work at home can bring some benefits, ultimately, when her children are also at home, the benefits are significantly mitigated. Finally, while the three surveys were expected to be able to capture the oscillation between school formats, at least one survey respondent described many changes between subsequent surveys.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 08 Sep 2023 19:02:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2244203</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>What Is the New Normal? An Analysis of Post-COVID-19 Commute and Work Patterns</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2087424</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The study is addressing the following questions: (1a) What are the adoption rates and frequencies of working from home in Spring 2022 (representing at least the “back side” of the COVID-19 pandemic, if not yet completely post-COVID), and what are the intentions to continue to work remotely in the future? (1b) What demographic, geographic, and attitudinal characteristics are associated with adoption/non-adoption, higher or lower frequencies? (2a) What is the distribution of one-way commute lengths, and how has that distribution changed since before COVID-19? (2b) Putting one-way commute lengths together with commute frequencies, what is the distribution of total weekly commute distance traveled, and how has that distribution changed since before the pandemic? (2c) What socio-economic and other characteristics are associated with one-way commute lengths and total weekly commute distances? (3) How have the shares of commute modes changed since before the pandemic, and what characteristics are associated with those changes? To address these questions, we have designed, and are in the process of fielding, an online survey of employed Georgia residents. The study team is recruiting approximately 2000 respondents through an online opinion panel vendor (Qualtrics). Ultimately, the team will also develop models of key behavioral indicators, to enable them to control for multiple behavioral influences simultaneously.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2022 10:56:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2087424</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Study of  Impacts of  Technology on the Future Workforce at the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration (MDOT SHA)</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2072000</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Technologies have made remote work a new reality. More administrative tasks can be performed virtually from anywhere, using a variety of electronic systems. The potential for remote work has grown greater in a more advanced economy and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend. A recent Gallup survey (2021) estimates that 60 million U.S. full-time jobs, about half of the entire workforce, can be done remotely and predicts a 37% reduction of in-person days worked per week even when the pandemic wanes.
As an alternative solution to office shutdowns during the pandemic, remote work arrangements can present challenges to organizations whose mission is customer-driven and requires frequent interactions and engagements and where job designs, policies, performance standards and organizational culture may not have been fully updated to accommodate, monitor, evaluate and reward remote work. Facing a dilemma between shifting back to normal and continuing remote work, organizations need to make long-term decisions about how to achieve an optimal remote work strategy in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary focus of this study is to assess state highway administration's (SHA’s) needs for administrative assistants and business analysts in today’s workforce. The research team aims to provide recommendations on how administrative assistants and business analyst jobs may be redesigned to better meet SHA’s needs in function areas where there is a strong need for administrative assistants and business analysts. Meanwhile, to support the redesign effort the team provides a comprehensive strategy on a mix of work modes (remote/office/hybrid) based on analysis of SHA’s work requirements and worker attributes.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Dec 2022 10:52:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2072000</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Evaluating the Adoption and Impacts of Telecommuting for Incorporation into the Modeling Process</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1987581</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This project aims to (1) explore how employees’ and employers’ attitudes, perceptions and preferences toward telecommuting may have changed due to the pandemic, and (2) provide insights into predicting future behavior in terms of telecommuting adoption and the potential impacts on other daily activity-travel participation.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Jun 2022 12:26:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1987581</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Latest National Analysis of Ridership Trends </title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1938498</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This project builds upon the research team’s existing work quantifying the impact of different factors affecting transit ridership – including the recent COVID-19 pandemic – at a nation-wide scale. The project extends the multi-city analyses to include the most recent, up-to-date data through 2020 using the latest National Transit Database (NTD) ridership statistics for both rail and bus. Econometric and statistical models will be used to identify a short-term “COVID-19 effect” after controlling for changes in levels of service, population, macroeconomic conditions, and other relevant variables. Other emerging trends and changes in transit ridership due to changes in factors like employment, gas prices and telecommuting will also be explored. 
The project will establish the sensitivity of transit ridership to changes in variables such as service miles, employment, and gas prices for the most recent period of dramatic decline (2020). ]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Apr 2022 14:16:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1938498</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Synthesis of Information Related to Airport Practices. Topic S06-07. Impacts of COVID to Airport Work Models and Strategies</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1897249</link>
      <description><![CDATA[ACRP Synthesis 126: Impacts of COVID-19 on Airport Work Models and Strategies, from TRB's Airport Cooperative Research Program, provides information on those airports that experimented in remote work, provides options for airports that did not participate in remote work, and identifies emerging trends.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 Dec 2021 15:00:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1897249</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Tax Revenue and Telecommuting</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1878005</link>
      <description><![CDATA[According to the D.C. Tax Facts, the motor fuel tax in 2000 was reported to be $32.65 million dollars and was drastically decreased to $25.1 million dollars in 2017. Transportation infrastructure is costly to build and even costlier to maintain; in 2017, The Condition of the District’s Roadways reported that the actual expenditure on the District roadways was 4.5 times higher than the FY 2010-2014 average. Concurrently, the adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles and decreases in road trips due to the transition to telecommuting and eCommerce, especially with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, are significantly influencing transportation revenue generation from gasoline taxes. This will become a serious challenge for infrastructure asset management in the near future.
The main objective of this research is to investigate the most influential parameters and possible scenarios affecting the District’s Highway Trust Fund revenues due to increased telecommuting and changes in commute mode in order to propose a multi-criteria decision-making model for transportation tax revenue generation.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Sep 2021 13:00:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1878005</guid>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>