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[00:08:54] OK. I think we can start now.
[00:09:01] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our Webinar series, which occurs here on our Facebook page every Friday at Noon Live. Today we have with us John Slason, who is the director of Future Mobility Planning at Resource Systems Group in Burlington, Vermont. John provides professional engineering and planning consulting services to public and private clients focused on the emerging big issues in transportation. His interest is on how we can leverage emerging technologies to improve our world with a growing population, Funding challenges, aging infrastructure, and the changing climate, all creating thriving and desirable places for us to live, work and play. Today, Jon will share with us the latest research on trends in telecommuting and on whether some part of it is here to stay and what impacts it can have on our transportation system. So I am going to pass it on to Jon now. If you have any questions during Jon's presentation, feel free to post them in the comments section. And after he's done speaking, we can go over the questions.
[00:09:57] Jon, thank you so much for being here.
[00:09:59] Great. Thank you, Brianna. Thank you, everyone. And so now that planning role suddenly means how to help communities and agencies plan responses around this unfortunate pandemic. And so we'll be discussing some of the effects of the pandemic on transportation, as well as the conversation on the on the telecommuting or working from home. And you can see I'm working from home today.
[00:10:30] Today, I think as of this morning or of yesterday excuse me there was one point five million cases of the COVID disease and the US is now the global epicenter of cases, something around four hundred and sixty thousand cases as of the latest that I've kept track.
[00:10:52] It has profound effects on our transportation system and social distancing that we call it our physical isolation has taken different forms in different places today there's a picture in front of you that shows the Rome, the Spanish Steps in Rome. And I remember being at this particular location and being overwhelmed with people. And now you can see the stark reality that we have in front of us.
[00:11:18] However, there are some silver linings and benefits to the fact of reduced mobility and reduced travel is that this is an example just from the San Francisco Bay area and there's numerous photos online of now the Himalayans become visible from parts of India that they haven't seen it for over 30 years. And in this case, we're seeing parts per million of CO2 levels drop. I don't know what percentage that was about 60 parts per million there in just a few weeks with the significant decline in traffic. But there's a difficult reality to all this is that we have a significant challenge for and I put quotes for Main Street for those of you in the Burlington area. You'll recognize this street as our core shopping district, as Church Street. And it's obvious that the lack of commercial activity, socialization, the restaurants, everything is completely shut down to maintain the necessary social distancing that we need to fight off this horrible pandemic. But the other reality is that offices are empty. We have significant amounts of office space across the country that now are sitting empty and people are trying to figure out what to do and where are we going to go from here. So that's gonna be the topic that we have some interesting data points to discuss today. And I will say, first and foremost, I don't have the answers, but I have some data points then and some ways that we can explore this and it be great to hear your feedback at the end of this to understand whether you think it's here to stay and what effect it might have on your industry. As we have this Facebook live event, we have this dramatic shift online platforms across the world, people are experiencing new ways to interact and be social with each other through isolation. Other ways our life has dramatically changed in the last few weeks. In New Hampshire, tollway traffic is down over 50 percent in just the last four weeks. The airline industry has had significant changes in their demand, down ninety five percent in just over the last year. Our overall use of electricity is down, which again, has maybe some positive benefits, not so much in New England because of our hydro demands, but in other parts of the country, you can imagine the climate benefits. The oil prices now I'll be at OPEC, I believe just was recently cutting back production again. But the oil prices are at their lowest level in 18 years. Again, though, with the lack of demand for travel. And this is recent news. As of yesterday, with sixteen point eight total unemployment claims in just the last few weeks, few businesses are immune from this shock and it's estimated that the unemployment rate now is approaching 20 percent.
[00:14:20] As a just a point of reference, in nineteen thirty three, we had a maximum unemployment rate of 24 percent in the height of the Great Depression.
[00:14:35] So we realize that economic activity is unfortunately it's linked to a lot of the ways we use mobility. Google's coming to the fore with some recent data that's showing us how we're affected. This is a U.S. country wide perspective. Transit stations are down 51 percent, according to Google. And this data, workplaces alone are down nearly 40 percent. And residential travel and points of travel around the home are up 12 percent. So we still are requiring mobility. We're out there doing our essential services, doing our grocery shopping, home repairs are up and so other other activities are happening. Google has a data point for Vermont as well. And you can see our change in transit is down 71 percent and our workplaces a little lower than the US, just over 40 percent and then the residential is near the same. Now, this is another data point from Unacast. It's a big data pass, passive data provider and aggregator. They're using cell phones and every cell phone has a unique trace that these companies are able to aggregate so much like Google had this one, this website provides a assessment of how your mobility has changed relative to your previous average pre COVID situation. And it also links, It shows you on the next chart. I'll show you. Is that the correlation with the covid epidemic pandemic and so Vermont actually gets a grade A. We're doing a great job in terms of the way that we're socially distancing ourselves, that we have had over a 70 percent reduction in our nonessential travel. And we know that it's had profound effects. So that's what some of the other earlier data, the economic data. We realized that that that this does have a negative impact on many parts of our communities. But hopefully it means that Vermont can can prevail and move quicker through this pandemic situation. And so this chart actually goes county by county. And you can see that other parts of Vermont are supposedly doing better in terms of reducing their nonessential travel. But Chittenden County, I think with their hospital and the just the population that we have, we have a little bit less ability to to reduce that net travel. And then just on this chart, as I reference that, we reference the COVID cases on a daily basis on this chart and this website that's linked on the PowerPoint, you can visit after this presentation and you can explore state by state, county by county. And it does show that social distancing really does matter for the health of our community. Now, public transit. I'm not going to spend much time on public transit because I know that I believe Stephen Falbel is going to be speaking to you in another couple of weeks. And public transit has has a real difficulty right now. We are seeing overall demand down nearly 80 percent in travel. And while that's good for social distancing and the health of our pandemic, it is a real struggle for our agencies. And I don't have the Vermont GMT data, but I hope that maybe Stephen might bring that to you all. And transit, for instance, is just an application that they track worldwide transit. And if you go to this website, you can go to specific agencies all around the world and see how they've been affected by the pandemic. Now it's shifting into the online interaction we've seen that U.S. remote work has gone up two to three times in just over two months. Zoom, the common platform that's been used widely, has seen daily average users increase from 10 million up to 200 million in just the last three weeks. And then Microsoft, through their Team's program that's been their primary online interaction tool, has seen daily record of meeting minutes. So we go from 2.7 billion meeting minutes in a single day, and that's up again, 200 percent from 900 million meeting minutes in mid-March.
[00:19:04] So people are overwhelmingly shifting to the online platforms.
[00:19:12] Another data point here is somewhat similar is that it again shows an increase of those using the virtual private network VPN to connect to your systems remotely. This shows the dramatic increase as the shutdown start to occur. People shifted to their VPN is this website tracks dates over time and there is a long term average of approximately twenty seven percent. And then these peaks before were holidays when people would would work from home on these government holidays. But now you can see that we're up closer to sixty four percent of people registering their VPN's working from home.
[00:19:56] You can see how the points are starting to combine and coalesce around this number around 60 percent or so.
[00:20:02] This is a poll recently released from Gallup that they have now estimated that about 62 percent of U.S. workers are working remotely to some degree. And this is the end of March, early April timeframe. And you can see the dramatic increase from just the mid-March. So we're just talking about just the latter half of the most recent month and the dramatic increase in working remotely.
[00:20:30] So the question is, are we changing our behaviors? Working remotely requires new behaviors to be learned. Talking like we are today.
[00:20:44] Is a challenge for many of us. We're not used to this way to engagement. We like I like being in front of people face to face and we're doing the best we can.
[00:20:54] But we're also seeing that other behaviors are changing in this way. Microsoft has released some data that they're trying to understand how the actual behaviors of meetings are changing.
[00:21:03] And in this case, they're saying that their product of Teams is saying they're using it longer during the day and they say they may not necessarily mean people are working longer, but that their people are breaking up the day. They're taking more productivity breaks, more flexibility. It allows them to do the other obligations that they have within their day. I think that's a really powerful benefit of working from home. And others recognize that as well.
[00:21:31] Jared from Microsoft mentions that the simplest example of how meeting to have changed is that the chat function now where before those people on the remote end of any meeting was always the people on the telephone, you're scratchy.
[00:21:46] And you're saying, what can you what are you saying? Can you speak up now with the online platforms and the video calls? We're all at equals. And we realize that it's video. It's audio. It's then also chatting. Everything has to be incorporated. And then we ourselves are changing our behaviors to become more multimodal in the way that we treat our meetings. And so this will be it will change. The way that co-working happens begins the way that to me, it will change the way that working happens. And so that we will be looking at how to engage more online, more interactively, although remotely. And this might then have profound ramifications for how do we facilitate public meetings? How do we do other things in this new context?
[00:22:36] So now jumping into is this behavior going to stick? How is it going to change us? These experiences will guide our expectations. This is from a Politico magazine where they discussed big thinkers.
[00:22:54] And this editor mentioned that not every job can be done remotely, but people are learning the differences and they're realizing that now. Just with the ability to download an application, and in the past it was permission from their bosses. But now it's being forced upon them that they realize that how seamless this can be. We realize now that a lot, Awful lot of meetings, potentially doctor's appointments and classes can really be done remotely or in this case reference by email, she said. And now we realize that it can be this is going to be a bottom up explosion in demand for this increased flexibility. An example that there is not many that we can draw on, but there was a study in 2017 by Oxford economists that just pointed out that a simple two day London tube strike. So we're already in a shut down for I don't know how many weeks, about a month in Vermont and 5 percent of London commuters permanently switch their travel behavior after that two day strike. You can only imagine what percentage might be here. As we've been forced to explore other options. And so the authors of that study posited that changing routes for those few days of disruption gave enough confidence that these new that these commuters found other desirable options. So RSG expects that some degree of permanent shift will result from the COVID pandemic. So a few more reasons for you. Unfortunately, we're in this for the long haul. This is a study from the Imperial College of Medicine in the UK and I've seen this discussed in many other literatures and online journals at this point. But this is a chart that they put together in this research. And what this chart shows is that we're going to have these periodic waves of infection that will affect our communities. And what's going to happen is that we will have intermittent social distancing triggered by trends in the disease so that we can have temporary relax and visit with each other, maintain face to face communications. But then we need to have a plan put in place for when we need to introduce social distancing again. There will be a new normal as of this. China is our leading example of a country that's passed the peak of new infections for this initial wave. Microsoft is still seeing new Team users every day in the country compared to the end of January. However, it's still documented that travel restrictions are still in place. They have temperature checks throughout their cities and their strict quarantines, even those for returning travelers within their own country. Singapore has implemented a circuit breaker model where they have now a defined set of responses so that if the wave of infection were to approach again, they immediately can implement the circuit breaker and they're using testing to identify where workers and where students must be sent home. If there's an outbreak in a certain part of the city. And everyone is rethinking remote work. The CBRE a large industry company that owns and maintains that massive amounts of commercial real estate. They do research on this and this is a recent quote that remote work is something they are thinking a lot about and people are being forced to do it. But we will think that some will inevitably stick. Their question is for how many and for how long. And that is the question for all of us. But they're concerned about who needs office space. In addition to the countless small retail and restaurant businesses that are unfortunately going to be permanently vacated after this economic situation, there is going to be a growing number of corporate chains that may have more cash flow. They're also beginning to, are unwilling to pay their rent. As of today, Staples Subway and Mattress Firm have also have all stopped paying the rent. Wework the massive co-working office space has stopped paying rent to some of their US locations. And these are just the big firms. You can let alone the smaller organizations that are that are going to rethink. Do we need to have that extra overhead and office space to bring us all together? And maybe the answer is yes, but it may be a little smaller. So what does this teleworking looking like? The pre COVID work from home percentage Vermont actually had a pretty high percentage of our working from home depending on which survey and how many years you're going back to Vermont with somewhere around 6.5 to about 7.4 percent of your working from home. Percentage according to the American Community Survey.
[00:28:14] Some other data points here. Just throwing it at you is that there Global Workplace Analytics. They're an organization that study working from home globaly. They estimate that, this pre-COVID estimate that fifty six percent of the U.S. workforce holds a job that could be compatible at least partially with remote work. Gallup shows that 43 percent of the workforce works at home already, at least some of the time. And then according to the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 16 percent of the workforce already work remotely as well. So Gallup recently did a poll for this COVID situation, Is that they said, once restrictions on business and schools are lifted. If your employer left it up to you, what would you prefer to do? Fifty nine percent say they want to work remotely as much as possible. Forty one percent said going back to the office as much as you previously did. They made it pretty stark choice in this case. And we know there's a lot of nuances, but if fifty nine percent of people said we want to work remotely as much as possible. And given the other benefits that we've discussed, it's clear that we're going to see some changes.
[00:29:27] So to summarize, why is this going to stick? There's fears of poor work outcomes among managers and executives that are not coming to fruition.
[00:29:35] For years, people were not allowed to work remotely. There either wasn't enough trust or just lack of experience with the technology. Or just, yeah, I guess inexperienced with the experience to do that. They all are going to see increased demand from employees for the reasons that we've just discussed.
[00:29:57] Now, before this COVID situation, it's apparent that there's going to be increased pressure for disaster preparedness. We have a more resilient workforce if we can have more flexibility about where and when do we work. There's the increased awareness of the cost savings opportunities from the organization's point of view, let alone the individual. If I'm not commuting and spending money on my commute, my money will be spent elsewhere. There's also the increased awareness of the potential impact on sustainability. I mentioned the CO2 impact and then let alone there's some other pollution impacts that are clear that if we reduce our travel, the global workplace analytics that I mentioned before estimated that post-COVID , they would see between 25 and 30 percent of the workforce working at home one or more days a week. Compare that to the 7 percent or so today in Vermont. So this is a very approximate rough estimate, and I'm sharing the assumptions here on this chart. But this is work that I did, too. This is work that actually was done a long time ago that I've refreshed for this purpose today looking at what types of industries these are our twenty, seventeen jobs in Vermont by employment sector.
[00:31:13] The big unknown is the economic shock that this is going to cause and we don't know which jobs are going to shift. That's one of the first unknowns here. The second unknown is trying to estimate what types of jobs would be suitable to a remote working condition, and certain industries are more flexible than others. However, even really manufacturing heavy involved personnel might have administrative jobs that they can move offsite. So let alone, I think every industry has an opportunity and that's where this chart shows. For instance, how forestry, fishing and related activities. I said maybe 20 percent of the staff could be remote. Maybe at a low you have 5 percent. So by looking at that probabilities and the number of jobs, I estimated that if there's a low uptake in remote workforce, it might be 9 percent post- COVID. And then at a medium uptake, it's closer to that to the other estimate that was put together around the twenty two percent. And then maybe based on our mix of jobs and this again, this is pre-COVID job mix, maybe a high uptake of around thirty seven percent would be suitable for a work remote workforce.
[00:32:28] So how much impact do we have here? We realize, though, that work from home is only one part of the travel equation. If we're concerned about vehicle miles traveled greenhouse gas emissions, we have to realize that we still have mobility needs for essential trips. If we're happened to be in a social lockdown situation or if we are not in a lockdown situation, we're gonna go and do these personal trips to the grocery stores, the shopping, the doctors, the recreation. And we realize that those trips actually meet 70 percent of our travel demand. So we're still even if we work from home, it's only gonna be a fraction of our total miles that we could be reducing.
[00:33:07] But we also see that the post pandemic, some jobs and sectors might shift, the economic impact will be shifting this chart here in the bottom left just is a recent research from this RBC research organization that shows as of March, because of the pandemic, we actually now have a majority of people who have now purchased groceries online for the first time.
[00:33:32] I have a situation with little kids at home and I could see the benefit of this. So I think there's gonna be new people trying new things and some of those behaviors might stick.
[00:33:44] So what will our world look like? But even more important, what do we want our world to look like in a post pandemic situation?
[00:33:53] A quick introduction to RSG and what we what we do professionally.
[00:34:01] RSG is a firm over 100 professional staff across eight offices across the country. We are over 30 years in business, founded in 1986, and our core market is in transportation, namely behavior and forecasting. We have these three categories of capabilities, we have choice modeling, travel forecasting and planning, and these things are being brought to bear now. As to forecasting what this COVID situation might unfold for us.
[00:34:31] In the choice modeling, we understand what people are willing to pay, what people demand and what types it in future scenarios in travel forecasting, then we build a model to then say, how are those choices going to manifest in a future situation when faced with all these other changes, be it different land uses be it different demographics. And then planning puts them together. Planning is building a shared vision with different stakeholders and saying, how would you want your world to look? Let's find a way to back cast and get there.
[00:35:05] So the four things that RSG is now doing is that we are quickly deploying surveys, where targeted response monitoring, we're doing observed cell phone response monitoring through smart phones and surveys and then doing scenario planning with clients. And a quick summary of these is that we have some certain clients now that are that are asking for us to set up Web based panel surveys to track people's behaviors now and then over the next few months as this pandemic hopefully moves out. We'll be setting up questionnaires incorporating, mapping and other child behavior suit sweets. And then the big data, passive data side is that this is a situation. The data here shows Grand Central Terminal, New York City. We're trying to track how many unique cell phone pings were being observed and we could do a day by day analysis and start to tell communities how their behavior and social distancing is actually happening and whether certain responses can be influenced. It happened tomorrow if we removed our stay at home order. We can start tracking these with these cell phone products.
[00:36:26] RSG also has a GPS phone based survey and people can download this onto their phone. You have full permission and you would be taking surveys to say, why did you travel? Who traveled? What precautions? We're having interest from communities that are looking to verify that certain businesses and certain individuals are experiencing things the correct way in this covered pandemic. Meaning, we have a community in the southern US that they need verification to say that our businesses actually behaving appropriately in this COVID. So they want to get a bunch of people to take this survey, go about their business and saying, did you see hand washing? Did you see disinfecting sprays? Did you see people wearing masks? And you get this social surveying type of buy in. And so we're getting this type of information out there to our clients. And then lastly, what excites me the most is building the what if scenarios, is that if we can identify the goals and visions of what should be achieved in the future and identify the metrics to say, are we achieving those? Then we can develop models and that type of model that I use, is called a strategic model where we can test hundreds of combinations of various inputs and vary them to small degrees. And so you can have hundreds of combinations being tested and we can start to evaluate what would happen with more people working from home. And then you say, how would it shift our our employee make-up? And then what happens if we put the rest of the people who are not working from home in high capacity transit? You can start to see the the system and understand how much vehicle miles traveled might be impacted by these situations. And then we also evaluate the effects of technologies and other external drivers on behavior change. So I've covered a lot and I really look forward to your questions. And I hope that it covered telecommuting appropriately, but also gave you an insight into some of the other travel pieces and complexities of this horrible pandemic. So thank you very much. And I'll turn it over to you, Brianna.
Brianna [00:38:48] Thank you so much, Jonathan. We have a few questions. Do you want to stop sharing your screen so you can? Perfect. OK. So the first question is, are you concerned that after COVID-19, public transit will not bounce back in the same way that car travel will? And in fact, that many choice transit users, those who have other options, may abandon transit?
Jon [00:39:14] Yeah, I absolutely. I'm having a conversation with a micro transit provider currently in the shared mobility space. So that's not even the fixed route transit switch. Already we're showing a decline in ridership. And then I mentioned that chart from the Imperial UK, which I have a high degree of confidence in, that we're gonna have some waves of infection until we can get a vaccine. And shared mobility fixture transit being kind of the lowest priority of that is gonna be the most affected. Those choice riders are going to have options to either share with fewer people. So that's where the micro transit, the small vans might be actually more preferable. And you can maybe clean them better. You'll have more accountability. So I am I'm definitely worried about our fixed rate transit system and and the role that choice riders have in subsidizing the financial viability of those services.
Brianna [00:40:14] And on the other side of that, might some people who have learned that they can work from home, be more likely to stay home and less likely to commute?
Jon [00:40:26] Absolutely. The stats where 7 percent today are people who are currently telecommuting in Vermont and if the data suggests that it may be upwards around 60 percent in this situation. I know many people. This is suboptimal conditions. You have kids in the background, you have people at home, you have housemates. You have no second barrier that are being used as your friends. So not everyone's interested or willing to to work from home so that 60 percent can be more moderated down, I think at 20 percent. It all also depends on the time horizon that you're looking at. And so absolutely, I think it's going to be increasing above the 7 percent for sure.
Brianna [00:41:17] Do you have any thoughts about what it says about parking lots and highway infrastructure?
Jon [00:41:25] That's that's the interesting case. It will Depend on the amount of travel that's actually reduced and there's there's two conditions here. One is, are we in a stable condition? But our behavior has changed, meaning the COVID is stable and that we're able to do our normal day and day business. But we've now changed working from home. That's SITUATION 1 and then SITUATION 2 is if we're in a social situation, social lockdown. Clearly in a social lockdown, we have excess capacity in all of our transportation infrastructure and we should be doing other things with it. If we're if we're able to do so. So the likes of New York City and Bogota and other communities putting in temporary bike lanes. Burlington restricting parking on some streets and restricting maybe walking and biking. Those are the examples that we need now, packaged responses if this infection were to increase again having a wave infection. But that first situation I mentioned that the amount of working from home or the amount of commuting is only about 30 percent of any one household travel. If you would then only take 50 or 25 percent of people, working and now working from home. It's still going to be only a 5 to 10 percent probably of net vehicle miles traveled being changed. And that may or may not be enough to significantly reimagine the existing transportation infrastructure that we have. We need the other pieces that have been the focus of Sustainable Transportation Vermont for years that travel demand management, you need the incentives for not driving and we need to provide the other alternatives.
Brianna [00:43:15] OK. And what is your sense of how increasing grocery delivery impacts VMT efficiency of getting groceries to people versus folks going in person to grocery stores ? And are deliveries done per household, or are they delivering to multiple households per trip?
Jon [00:43:32] You know, that's a great question and I would be lying to you to know the answer. The difficulty and this is all that trip chaining. Most people when they go to a shopping center, either groceries or the all whatever it might have been. You don't typically just go for one shot and you're done groceries sometimes. It is a nuance. In this case, it could result in equal VMT if it's just a livre from a grocery store to your home. That might have already happened anyway. So it's a like for like substitution. The worst cases than where you would have done two or three shopping trips together and then now you're getting individual orders from those three places. And that's gonna be only shown up in the details and the data that we want to collect. We hope that that that our public agencies are very interested in these questions as well.
Brianna [00:44:34] What if we wanted to help people drive less? What will we do at this moment as people emerge from the pandemic?
Jon [00:44:42] It's a great question. I think we we need to provide. The alternatives in Vermont are limited. If I can think about Vermont, which our land use influences so much of our travel, and that's not going to change. There has been people surmising that the suburbs are going to be even more attractive in a post COVID situation because it provides people more space. Where I am able to go outside in Vermont and go out in my lawn. There are cities now across the world that are not able to go outside at all.
[00:45:28] And.
[00:45:30] So land use is so important to our travel decisions. We need to either make commitments to either fund transit with a frequency that would work for people because we don't have the density just to get a few people on the few peak hour buses that occur. And we are also in situations where the density, that that is, they're just that the bus routes that already serve it don't go enough places. So I think it's a political commitment to more frequency on our transit systems. It's also then an ability to travel safer by other alternative modes. And again, it it goes back to things that this organization and others have been trying to do for years, which are safer, better protection for bicyclists and improved public transit. I think those are those are fundamental things that take things from the transportation side, but we can not lose sight that land use really influences travel behavior.
Brianna [00:46:36] And this question is also related to travel behavior. Do you think that people change their behavior regarding transportation after some of this subsides or will they have to go back to their same old ways? How can we leverage this to get people to actually permanently change their transportation?
[00:46:56] I'm I'm a believer that once people try things. You'll either agree or you'll disagree. And I think there's gonna be a lot of people who have some positive outcomes from this working from home situation.
[00:47:11] And.
[00:47:14] I would imagine that there's going to be a groundswell of people coming up to your employer and saying, I want flexibility to work two days a week from home. There could be a government mandate, as I mentioned, about the the ability to respond to disaster. And if we need to start having a prepared plan for how we can deal with social distancing. If and when it's required again, then companies might need to be more prepared with the technology infrastructure, the VPN, the laptops, the headsets, whatever it might be to work remotely. So I think there could be an honest question to say, as a government, do we need to ask our companies to start being officially more prepared for this?
[00:48:04] And then from a bottom up point of view, I'm confident that there's going to be a groundswell of interest and the companies who want to retain good employees and to and the companies that want to be responsive to their employees needs will start providing some options to work from home.
Brianna [00:48:23] OK, great. Thank you. That was our last question. So thank you so much for being here and thank you for all questions We'll see you back here next Friday.