Most cities struggle to cope with traffic congestion, with various policies designed to counter it.  One of the more logical revolves around disrupting the 9-5 invoked rush hours at either end of the day that place tremendous strain on transport infrastructure.

Whether it’s encouraging people to start and end their working day at different times, or working from home, flexible working has quite logical benefits, yet walking through any major city during rush hour highlights just how poor the takeup has been.

Unperturbed, new research from Swinburne University of Technology set out to explore what the potential benefit of flexible working could be in terms of traffic reduction.

The researchers surveyed a few hundred workers in Melbourne to explore the nature of their work, both their attitude towards flexible working and the availability of it, and then their commuting habits.  The analysis found that 64% of them were already working flexibly to some extent, albeit only 1 day per week on average.  The vast majority of them appreciated the ability to do so.

The data also showed that the vast majority of their work could be done remotely, with around 30% saying that as much as 80% of their work could be performed from anywhere.

Traffic reduction

So what impact might this have on traffic?  Well the research resorts to a degree of speculation, as it hypothesizes that the 64% of workers who do just a shade over 1 day a week remotely could lop around 100,000 commuters from Melbourne’s streets if it was extrapolated across the entire city.  If the remaining 36% of workers were able to work flexibly too, that would further reduce commuter numbers, and they speculate that flexible working could see a total reduction of 41% across the city.

It’s an argument I have sympathy for, as commuting is no one’s idea of fun, so any methods to reduce it have to be commended.  It’s just unfortunate that they resort to idle speculation to make their point, especially as the chances of having the entire population of a city working as the small sample the researchers surveyed seems remote.

Despite the concerns I have with the study, the general thesis that flexible working can reduce congestion retains its allure.  It’s just a shame that a study that promised to deliver hard evidence to support it largely failed to do so.