(gentle music)
- [Narrator] Traditionally,
regulatory agencies have approached our mobility needs
as an engineering problem.
Today, a diversity of transportation options
and changing preferences for where folks want
to live require a more personal approach.
The Texas Department of Transportation with help
from the Center
for Transportation Research is working proactively
to determine what travelers need
from their future transportation system.
- The thing is, we know change is coming
and that's gonna impact the way we travel.
And so being able to account for this, getting insight
into people's behaviors and these types of situations
that are arising are gonna let us better meet their needs
in the future.
- What we are trying to do is, can we learn something today
from preferences so that we can plan for tomorrow?
We cannot obviously wait for tomorrow
until tomorrow comes because we need
to start planning today.
And so the issue is how can we accomplish that?
- This study began as a way to look
into using stated preference questions
in our travel surveys.
So currently, we use the travel survey and the responses
to those questions to develop our travel demand model.
The questions that we use
to develop the travel demand model are
all revealed preference questions.
So they ask about what someone's actually done.
They ask about what trips they've made,
what roads they've taken, the transportation mode used.
Unlike revealed preference questions,
stated preference questions help us get insights
into situations that don't yet exist.
So for example, after the height of the COVID pandemic
and working from home, we're in a period of transition.
Companies are rethinking telecommuting policies,
and as they begin to change, we can't just use past behavior
or revealed preferences to predict future behavior.
Instead, we may turn to stated preference questions.
Specifically, this research project seeks
to use questions about people's workplace preferences
to gain insights and plan for future commuting patterns.
We found single women with young children,
people with long commutes,
those who have private study areas in their homes,
self-employed, non-essential service workers,
they all preferred to work from home.
On the other hand, older men,
people from lower income houses,
people living in rural areas,
and those in essential occupations prefer
to work from the office.
And then non-single women with young children,
low income households, part-time employees,
and professional managerial
or finance occupations have the highest predisposition
for working from a third workplace.
- In the past 20 years or so, planning has gone
into a more proactive role as opposed to a reactive.
But I think the difference today is
that many of these things
that we see today are not going to go into tomorrow.
We cannot wait to plan.
That has to start today,
and that's what our project helps with.
- [Narrator] For more information
and to find the publication for this project,
please visit the TxDOT research library
at the link shown below.