Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Globally, work from home (WFH) has persisted even as the acute threat of COVID-19 has waned. Prior research suggests that WFH reduces commute travel but may increase non-work travel, leaving its net effect uncertain. Most existing studies rely on cross-sectional designs and cover a limited set of travel modes. We examine longitudinal, city-level evidence from 152 center cities in five English-speaking countries (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) from 2019 to 2023. We combine annual, mode-specific travel-distance estimates from Google’s Environmental Insights Explorer with annual measures of WFH prevalence derived from city-level job postings. Across cities, changes in WFH prevalence are not significantly associated with changes in all-mode distance traveled. By contrast, higher WFH prevalence is associated with lower public transit travel: a 1 percentage-point increase in WFH is associated with a 0.59% decrease in intra-city public transit distance traveled, implying a reduction of 0.47 billion kilometers when anchored to 2019 transit levels across the sample. Together, these results suggest that in center cities, expanding WFH is unlikely to reduce total travel demand and may instead shift travel away from public transit.</p>