As a travel demand management and environmental policy, the government actively promotesalternative work arrangements such as telecommuting. Against this backdrop, several empiricalstudies, which aim to verify the benefits of telecommuting, have been recently conducted. Little consensus,however, exists with respect to the defining, measuring, and forecasting telecommuting, although these arefundamental basis of policy evaluation and academic research. As a fundamental research for analyzingtelecommuting impacts, this paper reviews various definitions regarding telecommuting, examines telecommutingpenetration and level of telecommuting through review of available survey data in Korea, and forecasts futurepenetration. The result suggests that current home-based telecommuting penetration and level of telecommutingis approximately 0.5 to 1.1% and 0.2 to 0.5%, respectively, and is approximately 0.2% and 0.1%, respectively, forthe center-based telecommuting. In addition, shift-share analysis shows that home-based telecommutingpenetration in the Seoul Metropolitan Area in 2020 will be 1.3%, not much different with the current value.
Consequently, current telecommuting penetration is much lower than the value that is fed to us by the media(10~20%), and the future prospect is also much lower than the goal of government (30~45%); thus, we canconclude that government`s goal of telecommuting promotion is difficult to meet if active encouragement policywill not be introduced.