Introduction

Bournemouth University is consulting with UCU regarding the introduction of a home working policy. Academic work is well suited to home working, particularly when research is being conducted using the internet as a primary means of communication. Travelling to the office can substantially reduce the time available to conduct productive research. However the new policy has not considered fully the potentially adverse impact on productivity that would result from unecessary journey times. There is also concern that the policy may have negative impact on initiatives to reduce environmental impact and may be discriminatory. In order to provide evidence for consideration within this context the present study aims to map the geographic locations given as the home address of UCU members.

Method

The study uses data available on the UCU BU staff membership database. Postcodes were accurately Georeferenced to provide coorinates in latitude and longitude using the Google maps API. Home locations were then submitted to the Google API in order to calculate journey times by car, assuming avaerage traffic conditions. Five minutes are added to the time by car in order to take into acount walking distance from car park. The result has been multiplied by two in order to provide an estimate of total time per day spent travelling.

The results are shown for 256 members of UCU for whom data was available as an interactive web map.

Clicking on each point on the map shows a popup information box with total times in minutes, distance travelled in km and some additional non confidential details regarding each staff member in order to fully confirm the accuracy and reliability of the empirical data.

These data may not be a fully representative sample.Postcodes that could be georefrenced were not available for around 30% of the membership list. Some of the members have provided their home addresses in regions beyond normal commuting distance. These addresses may not be being used during normal term time. However they do indicate a connection with the region that may result in considerable time being spent there.

Distribution of travel times

##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##      10      38      54      90      93     600

The mean travel time is 90 minutes with a median travel time of 54 minutes. Twenty five percent of staff in the sample spend over 1.55 hours travelling to BU Talbot campus from their registered home post code.

Breakdown of travel times by gender

The opportunity to work from home may be particularly helpfull for female members of UCU for a wide range of reasons. The gender specific problems with a restrictive home working policy would be exacerbated if female travel times were greater than male travel times. In order to investigate this aspect the travel times have been broken down by gender.

There does appear to be a differnitial. On average female members of staff in the sample travel further to work than male members of staff. The difference and the distibution of values can be shown graphically as a box plot.

95% confidence intervals for median travel time

Bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals for the median travel time show a differential but with some overlap. The results are therefore indicative of a staisticall significant effect of gender on travel time, but not definitive. A statistically robust analysis would require a larger sample size. If the records for all staff were analysed it is highly likely that this differential would be confirmed.

Conclusion

The pilot study has provided some empirical evidence that may be useful in evaluating the impact of the policy under consideration. There are concerns that the impact on female members of staff may be exacerbated by a differential in distance from the workplace. The data may also be used to calculate environmenal impact in terms of carbon footprint and additional travel costs to staff if used to form the basis for a more detailed study.