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Kitchen Talks - The Tullinge Work Hub – Do neighbourhood telework centres support sustainable travel

Mistra SAMS Kitchen talks is a series of informal webinars where we present actual research from the program and our partners.

Tid: On 2021-05-12 kl 12.00 - 13.00

Plats: Zoom

Medverkande: Bhavana Vaddadi, KTH

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Digitally enabled neighbourhood telecommuting centres (NTCs) in residential areas may have the potential to reduce the environmental burdens of transport by shortening work trips and enabling modal shift. Bhavana Vaddadi present her paper with the results of a Living Lab where 64 participants were given access to an NTC. Through this Living Lab, the study identifies several conditions required for an NTC to substantially reduce commuting, and overall have a positive impact on sustainable travel.

The results indicate that while a small group of participants who lived very close to the NTC experienced significant lifestyle changes and adopted more sustainable travel practices, the overall changes in the sustainability aspects of travel for most participants were minimal.

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, most participants were required to work exclusively from home, which proved to have both positive and negative effects on the participants’ everyday lives and well-being. The participants reported a radical shift in attitudes towards remote working during this period, which they believed could lead to remote working becoming more common after the pandemic.

In this case, NTCs could possibly play an important role in enabling this shift, by remedying some of the identified drawbacks of working from home. This could in turn enable a larger reduction in commuting. In areas where more people commute by car, sustainability effects would likely be greater.