ITS Monday: Edition 21, 2025

A comparative analysis of the drivers and outcomes of work, location and commuting choices of the office only, hybrid, and home/other location only workers

A new academic article, co-authored by Edward Wei and David Hensher, of the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies. The abstract:

Hybrid work in an office and non-office locations on the same or different days, has become a mainstream work pattern in addition to only working in the office or working from home (WFH). This paper compares the three work groups within a framework covering drivers and outcomes for interconnected work patterns, location and commuting choices, using survey data of 981 randomly sampled employees in Australia.

The research goes beyond the socioeconomic characteristics of employees to examine other reasons why the three groups choose the way they work and commute, and their work-related motivation, performance and wellbeing. The research reveals the following key findings: 1) Having the highest level of motivation drives hybrid workers to work hard with more working hours than other groups. The long working hours, however, have a detrimental effect on their wellbeing and job performance, despite the highest level of job satisfaction.

However, they perform best in terms of contextual performance when more responsibilities and challenges are present. 2) The WFH/other only group has the healthiest wellbeing and the least counterproductive work behaviour on job performance. This suggests that work location is not the key reason for poor job performance and hence productivity. 3) The office-only workers have the best task performance as well as the second-best performance for contextual performance where more responsibilities and challenges are required. 4) A discrete choice model for the three groups suggests that commuting and work patterns for each day of the week (DoW) and time of the day (ToD), together with roles in the organisation, enable us to predict whether employees are likely to belong to one of three work-location alternatives.

These findings suggest a need to shift the focus of work and transport policy from the predominate focus on location to other work-related issues, such as work-related wellbeing, and to consider ways to recognise better work arrangements as a significant contributor to improved workforce performance.

Related iMOVE articles:

• Working from Home: Info, Projects & Resources
• Prospects for Working from Home: Assessing the evidence
• Traffic Congestion: Info, Projects & Resources

Industry invited to shape national standards for ZEBs

Brisbane gears up for an Olympic-sized challenge

“As Brisbane gears up to host the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the city is looking to do more than just upgrade its transport infrastructure. The challenge isn’t simply about getting athletes and spectators from point A to point B. It’s about moving people seamlessly and safely, creating an experience that feels effortless, and, most importantly, accessible to everyone.”

The impact of omitting key built environment factors on the potential health outcomes of active travel to school

A new academic paper, co-authored by Laya Hossein Rashidi, Jennifer L. Kent, and Emily Moylan, all from the University of Sydney. The abstract:

Active travel to school (ATS) programs promote walking and cycling because of the proven health benefits, which underpin the economic and social justifications for these initiatives. ATS programs often focus on improving the built environment (BE) around schools to encourage active accessibility. However, BE variables are frequently intercorrelated, making it challenging to include all relevant factors in choice models. Additionally, they are strongly associated with home-to-school distance, the primary determinant of ATS. Overlooking these interactions increases the risk of omitted variable bias (OVB) in travel mode choice models, reducing their effectiveness in accurately evaluating and informing ATS policies.

Related iMOVE article:

• Active Transport: Info, Projects & Resources
  

Related iMOVE project:

• Impacts & community benefits of a regional active travel network
• The TRavel, Environment and Kids (TREK) Study: 15 years on

Queensland Parliamentary Inquiry into e-mobility

I’d like to highlight two submissions to the Queensland Parliamentary Inquiry into e-mobility.

1. Bicycle Queensland – Bicycle Queensland calls for bold, co-ordinated action on e-mobility
2. Zipidi Submission to the Queensland Legislative Assembly Inquiry into E-Mobility Safety and Use

Investigating customers’ typical longitudinal behavioural responses in a large-scale mobility-as-a-service trial

Finally this week, another new academic paper, this one co-authored by Xin Chen, Ying Lu, Jake Whitehead, and Mark Hickman. The abstract:

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) aims to reduce the complexity of travel planning and execution for multimodal services. Understanding customer behaviour in real market conditions is crucial for designing and maintaining effective MaaS strategies. However, there is limited empirical data on customers actual subscription patterns, and few studies explore longitudinal behaviour in stable MaaS environments.

This study narrows these knowledge gaps based on trial data collected from a MaaS trial at the University of Queensland (UQ), in Brisbane, Australia, with a focus on customers’ MaaS subscriptions during the first semester of 2023 (from 20 February to 17 June). A sequence analysis reveals that there are seven types of representative subscription patterns in customers’ longitudinal sequences. Each pattern significantly differs in terms of the temporal distribution of daily membership states, primarily around the duration of the subscription and the variation of mobility bundle choices over time.

Overall, within the MaaS bundles on offer in this trial, customers are more likely to subscribe to mobility bundles only with unlimited allowances for public transport service in the long run, while only a minority of customers subscribe to multimodal mobility bundles. A multinomial logit (MNL) model based on the seven subscription patterns also confirms the important roles of customer demographics, motivations for joining the MaaS trial, built environment characteristics surrounding home locations, and trip booking characteristics, in shaping the heterogeneous subscription patterns.

The findings are insightful for MaaS operators/practitioners to design bundle offerings, thus retaining customer subscriptions. The proposed research framework can also be used to construct customer market segments or to plan future bundle offerings in MaaS markets.

Related iMOVE article

• MaaS (Mobility as a Service) in Australia