Despite the work-from-home advice being scrapped this month, the Dutch see no reason to travel to work daily as usual. 1.9 million travelers say they adjust their travel behavior permanently: About 1.5 million of them want to work from home for up to two days, if their employer is open for it. And about half a million employees don’t even want to go to work anymore.

The results were published in Newcom’s National Smart Mobility Monitor, which surveyed more than 6,400 Dutch adults last month. Remarkably, public transport commuters in particular prefer to continue working from home. More than two thirds choose this. A total of 200,000 rail passengers want to travel by rail less permanently. The same applies to the 140,000 employees who take the bus, tram or metro.

Among employees who commute to work by car, only 55 percent want to work from home on a structural basis. The rest prefer to sit behind the wheel on their way to the workplace. This relates to a total of more than 1.6 million car passengers.

According to research firm Newcom, more train passengers want to work from home because their travel time is longer, on average, than car passengers. “The train driver works relatively more in government institutions and also in the financial sector,” says Director Neil van der Veer. These organizations allow employees to work from home.

Overall, more than four in ten Dutch employees say they want to work from home permanently in the future. That’s just under 54 percent of employees who actually worked from home as a result of last year’s coronavirus.

Researchers expect that every work from home will have a significant impact on road and rail traffic. Before the Corona pandemic, Dutch railways carried 1.3 million passengers per day. If that was 200,000 less – especially during rush hour – the railways could use their equipment smarter. On the road, traffic jams decrease significantly when there is less traffic. The number of cars on the road by 8 percent cut traffic jams by half, according to data from the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management at the end of 2020.

The new commuting scale also shows that shared transit is becoming more and more popular. The number has doubled in the past two years. For example, 1.4 million Dutch people sometimes use a shared bicycle. Shared car use is also growing: 1.1 million people say they sometimes use them. Recent research by the Institute of Knowledge for Mobility (KiM) shows that this is essentially a research finding. Only 200,000 Dutch people have used such a shared car at least once in the past three years, which is 2 percent of the number of people with a driver’s licence.

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