Working at home and elsewhere in the city: mobile cloud computing, telework, and urban travel

In this dissertation I explore the relationship of mobile cloud computing with transportation planning and travel behavior through two related research questions. My first research question asks: how has planning practice, in relation to technological change, sought to mediate individual work location practices in the United States? I address this question through historical analyses and literature review, showing how work location has been an interest of planning practice in the United States since its inception, by way of zoning, land use transport modeling, and telework. I frame the history of “telecommuting” advocacy in the United States as a case of strategic niche management, which supported a limited reconfiguration of work location practices. Finally I consider the representation of telework through three phases of computing infrastructure: centralized computing, personal computing, and mobile cloud computing. My second research question asks: how does the adoption of mobile cloud computing affect work location decision making and travel outcomes among workers in a multimodal metropolitan regional context? I address this question with primary and secondary empirical data, including an analysis of American Time Use Survey data, and an original survey and set of interviews conducted in the New York Metropolitan area. Findings at the national level show that teleworking from home is growing in the United States since 2003 and is associated with reduced overall travel time and reduced likelihood of participation in peak hour travel. Primary interview research shows how computing infrastructure is part of the context of telework decision-making, and that under mobile cloud computing, workers use platforms for team collaboration, formal policies give way to informal flexibility, and workers choose location based on tasks at hand. Primary survey research shows that the use of mobile cloud computing platforms is associated with reasons for telework that represent greater personal autonomy. In the conclusion of this dissertation I point to a practical application of findings for informing incentive-based approaches to managing travel demand, and argue that computing infrastructure is an increasingly fundamental part of the scientific and technical knowledge that planners must relate to the public domain, creating both challenges and opportunities for the discipline.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference