That study is either flawed, misinterpreted, or does not apply to American workers. The average US commute is 32 miles round trip, and that happens every work day.

There is just no possible way that everyone is now driving <32mi every day running errands that they would have run before being forced into remote work.

Every other look at this, including things like the Apple Maps reports and government stats have shown that miles driven is way down. In fact I know a lot of families who have had to buy battery tenders for one of their cars because it's sitting unused so much.

The last two times I filled the gas tank in my car were 9/19 and 12/21.

Not US, but still.

American here with a long commute. I've filled up my car once during WFH. I used to fill it almost every week.

I'd like to dig into that study, because it feels impossible to me. Whether I work at home or an office, I have the same errands to run. Either way I'm going to plan my trip.

The only thing I can think of is that I might spread out the errands more across the week since I don't have to do it after work.

But anecdotally, my wife and I both started being home full time six years ago, and despite have kids since then (which greatly adds to the places one needs to go), our overall milage went way down, to the point where we even got rid of a car. After the pandemic, when the kids start doing a lot more after school activities, we may not even get a second car because Uber/Lyft can cover the rare trip that needs to happen simultaneously.

I agree it’s surprising. I suspect it’s not an individual phenomenon, but a population level statistic, which is influenced by lifestyle preferences of remote workers versus office workers.

Suppose office workers are more likely to live in an urban center, and conversely remote workers are more likely to live in a rural area. If that delta is large then it would easily explain the trend, because it really isn’t telling us about office workers versus remote, but rather urban versus rural.

Anecdotally, about half the folks I know who have gone remote have moved out to rural areas.

yeah, I think it's not right.

There are plenty of studies that show all resource use has dropped with the pandemic, including lots of delivery traffic.

The abstract for that paper isn’t clearly saying that:

> Approximately 20% of telecommuters stay at home all day during a workday, while only 8% of commuters do. Telecommuters that have at least one trip during their workday accrue more vehicle miles travelled and number of trips than their commuter counterparts.

So if you throw out the 20% who don’t leave their home, the rest accumulate more miles on average?

And they mention telecommuters meeting clients (vs. office workers staying at the office), so I’m not sure the populations are even comparable.

Maybe the paper goes into these details?