"We Still Want To Be Together And Still Want To Meet Face-To-Face"
Did COVID and Zoom break the link between telecommunications and travel been broken after 180 years? Travel behavior expert Pat Mokhtarian isn't so sure.
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Telecommunications has been with us for 180 years, ever since the invention of the telegraph. Over and over again during this time, there have been predictions that telecommunications will replace travel. But for the most part, what we’ve found is that telecommunications has stimulated more travel. But in the post-COVID zoom era, is this still true? Has telecommunications finally become so good and so fulfilling that we’re going to travel less? Or will there be just as much travel in the future — but just of a different type?
To explore this question, I sat down with Pat Mokhtarian, who’s a Regents professor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and one of the leading scholars on travel behavior, for a fascinating conversation about the future of travel — and whether travel is going to decline or just morph.
Bill Fulton
Pat, you are one of the leading scholars – if not the leading scholar – on this whole question of telecommunications and travel, physical travel, and how they interact. How did you get interested in this topic in the first place?
Pat Mokhtarian
My first job outside of graduate school was with the Southern California Association of Governments back in 1982. I was hired 90% as a traditional corridor studies transportation planner type and with the other 10%, my forward-thinking boss's boss was wondering what this telecommunications thing would be doing and could it be a solution to congestion and air quality in the L.A. region. Over time, those proportions essentially reversed, and the more I got to explore the impacts of telecommunications on travel, the more fascinated I became by the ever-evolving technology, and its ever-widening impacts on many societal dimensions. During that time, I saw the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics come and go, where working at home played a noticeable part in the traffic management plan.
Bill Fulton
The ‘84 Olympics, everyone expected it to be a disaster traffic-wise, and it was not. And that was really before the internet or anything like that.
Pat Mokhtarian
True, but even in those early days there were information workers who could generally take a lot of paperwork home. That made teleworking feasible, but also a lot more cumbersome than nowadays where everything's in the cloud.
Bill Fulton
Everybody had a big briefcase in those days.
Pat Mokhtarian
Right, exactly. So I was at SCAG from ‘82 to ‘88. And when I got into academia, one of my first research projects was helping to evaluate the transportation impacts of the state of California pilot project that was already underway before I joined the University of California, Davis in 1990. And again, I was just fascinated by the game-changing potential of the technology. For the first few decades of my career, transportation technology itself was fairly static. Of course, once the internet came along and all these platform-based services arose, and now with autonomous vehicles, transportation technology is really being transformed – again, by ICT [information and communication technology]. But in the early days of my career, the technological frontier was with ICT itself, and the intersection with transportation was all about substituting travel with telecommunications. And so that was where the glitzy appeal was at the time, for me at least.
Pat Mokhtarian predicts that self-driving cars will increase travel. She also predicts they’ll mostly be privately owned, not robotaxis like Waymo.
Bill Fulton
One of the things that I find most interesting about this topic and your work is, if you think all the way back to say the beginning of the telegraph, for 180 years we've been saying that telecommunications is going to substitute for travel, and yet overall travel has never gone down. Can you talk a little bit about why that is?
Pat Mokhtarian
I keep saying that both things can be true, or that everybody can be right. Like you said, clearly telecommunication is substituting for some travel. In one of my early papers [ “A Typology of Relationships Between Telecommunications and Transportation,” Transportation Research Part A, 24(3), 231–242 (1990), available here], I drew a pie chart— by hand probably at that point – of what I call the ”communications pie” and divided it into three parts, saying that for communication to occur, either there had to be a personal trip or face-to-face communication, or the transportation of an information object like a letter or a magazine or newspaper, or transportation of electrons or however you telecommunicate. And so if you think about those three modes of communication, you could move the boundary of the physical travel slice by replacing some of it with electronic communications.
But guess what? The whole pie is expanding. You may increase the share of telecommunications and reduce the share of travel, but if physical travel is also growing at the same time, then you may not be reducing physical travel in absolute terms.
In terms of conceptual relationships, I think about how the internet inspires travel by bringing interesting destinations into our living room on command. Unlike stumbling onto something on television, we can now intentionally research our vacations in advance. We can look for last-minute price bargains. So the internet is making it possible to travel more cheaply or to travel greater distances for the same price.
What else? We meet people online, which then makes us want to meet them in person. I don't think we've repealed human nature in the last hundred years. We still want to be together and still want to meet face-to-face.
Pat Mokhtarian
On the other hand, the internet also makes being apart easier, because now we're in touch with what we leave behind. For better or for worse, we're able to keep working, we're able to be in touch with family. The globalization of the economy was made possible by ICT. And so that's prompted all kinds of travel, of both people and goods. It makes us want to go farther and more often than we ever did.
I also saw that the substitution effects tend to be immediate, short-term and very noticeable, while the travel generation or stimulation effects that I'm describing are more indirect, longer term and harder to notice. And so we notice at a trip level that, “Yeah, I had this video meeting and didn't travel to see you,” but fail to notice those inspiration and facilitation and macroeconomic effects that I just mentioned. And even the video meeting example raises the point that a lot of increased telecom is not substituting for travel at all. It's just communication that wouldn't have taken place otherwise. I don't think you would've come all the way out here to interview me.
Bill Fulton
Nor would my Substack newsletter even exist probably, or I maybe would've talked to you on the phone.
Pat Mokhtarian
Which again is ICT.
Bill Fulton
I think it's obvious to most people that the internet stimulates some travel by making it easier to obtain information about different places. One thing that I hadn't thought about till you just said it now is that telecommunications actually might facilitate travel by allowing you to take things with you that you otherwise would have would have to stay put for. And that's counterintuitive at first, but it kind of makes sense.
Pat Mokhtarian
I think a lot of business trips are made now that wouldn't have occurred previously, because you would want to be at home with the family or for whatever reason. But now you can connect and reassure everybody or help deal with crises even long distance. I think that's huge. And it has given rise to the digital nomad phenomenon.
Bill Fulton
Do we value face-to-face interaction more now, and does that stimulate face-to-face interaction and travel? What's your perception about people's placing value on face-to-face versus zoom like we're doing here?
Pat Mokhtarian
That's a good question. I want to refer to my good friend Steve Polzin [who is a researcher at Arizona State University], whom I respect enormously. He is a thinker, looks at data a lot, learns from trends and has a sweeping big picture view of what's going on in all things transportation. He is suggesting that maybe we've broken this relationship between telecommunications and travel. He may acknowledge that in the past, telecommunications may have stimulated travel, but he's now suggesting that on net it's reducing travel. And of course my first reaction is, “Oh no. I've conducted so many studies that show the contrary, that can't possibly be true”. And then I have to remind myself to look at the facts rather than getting entrenched in what may only have previously been true.
And there are some suggestions that the previous relationship may, in fact, have been broken. You read about the loneliness epidemic and the idea that we are home alone more and that we've retreated into our digital caves and youngsters nowadays consider it more appropriate to text each other than to go see each other. So to answer your question, if you look at that kind of data, then you'd have to say, “Oh, maybe we don't need to travel as much.” And Steve likes to point to the plateauing of per-capita vehicle miles traveled [VMT, or driving] in the U.S.
But I keep saying, “Where's the airline travel?” I keep wanting to add them together to get the total amount of person-miles traveled. My suspicion is that total travel is probably increasing when you count airline travel into it. And that's another substitution-together-with-generation phenomenon, right? As incomes rise, then we're able to afford longer vacations to more exotic places. And so we're going to replace, or substitute, that road trip to grandma's with bringing grandma along when we go to Europe or wherever – generating more total travel than before, even if road travel declines or stays roughly constant.
So again, I don’t believe we have repealed human nature. We do want to be with each other in person. We also want to see and experience interesting things in person. Sure, I can watch CNN's documentary on Eva Longoria in Spain, but that makes me want to go there and see that beautiful scenery in person, and taste all those exotic dishes that she's talking about. It's just not the same doing it in some kind of artificial ICT format.
But then there’s travel itself. I believe we're hardwired to move. Just the sensation of movement, but also the things we experience while traveling: admiring the passing scenery, people-watching, the wind in our face, the mastery of a skill, whether it’s operating a vehicle or training ourselves to jog or skate or scuba dive or spelunk or hang-glide, or... It can happen at any scale from walking to boating to flying.
It’s fun to look into the artistic literature, if you will, and find all these authors who talk about the joy of movement per se. There’s a literature on movement as therapy. For example, horseback riding is a therapeutic instrument, if you will. Dance, as well – there's something about it that's mentally as well as physically therapeutic.
I was having a discussion with Brian Taylor [a transportation professor at UCLA] about the vehicle-miles traveled statistics [which have plateaued], and he said, “What do you think?” Because at one point, remember, there was a “peak car” discussion around the idea that millennials are beyond needing cars or wanting cars, and that we've probably seen the peak in per capita miles traveled. And I said, “I'm betting on more travel in the long run.” I'm still betting on more travel, assuming that incomes continue to rise.
Bill Fulton
But the purpose of the travel changes. It may be that people don't travel as much for things they need to do, like commuting to work, and they may substitute for that travel they want to take such as a longer trip for a vacation or flying instead of driving or something like that. Right?
Pat Mokhtarian
Absolutely. Take business travel, for example. You may say, “No, I really don't want to drive to Podunk City every month for this business meeting. Let's do that online, but hey, that'll free up some time that I might use to be more productive at the rest of my job or that I might use to go to conferences in more interesting locations.”
Bill Fulton
Is it your perception that we see more pressure to come back to the office? Is there tension between employers and employees about that? What's going on in that part of this?
Pat Mokhtarian
Oh, for sure. Employers see the value in face-to-face, in terms of the tacit knowledge, as the expression goes, of the mentorship, the hallway conversations, the enculturation of employees into the organizational ethos. And then they also probably have reservations about productivity. From the early days of telecommuting, that was a concern of management. And I had to see both sides. I had to say, yep, I get it. Some people will take advantage of being out of sight. But of course, the comeback is always, well, how do you know they're working in the office?
Bill Fulton
Unless you're going around watching them all the time.
Pat Mokhtarian
We called it MBWA: management by walking around.
We all should, as managers, be evaluating our staff on the basis of the timeliness, quality and quantity of what's being produced. In reality, that's pretty hard. And so we use visual cues. Managers have a feeling that so-and-so's slacking off and they really don't like it, plus there are all kinds of coordination issues when people are working remotely at different times and/or on different days.
But what I am seeing is that all these “return to office orders” are still almost always giving one or two days a week as a remote option. So that's totally different than pre-pandemic. When the pandemic first hit, my immediate reaction about the obvious need to work from home at the time was, “Ho-hum, I've seen this before with countless crises that prevented normal commuting, and then after the crisis was over, everything went back to status quo.” And by crises, I mean things that were known in advance like the Olympics, and also unexpected things like earthquakes and bridges collapsing and blizzards and transit strikes and you name it. But not too long into the pandemic, I realized that this was going to be different. First of all, much more universal, much more prolonged than any previous crises.
Bill Fulton
But none of them went on for years.
Pat Mokhtarian
Correct. And that was the difference. I quickly realized that this is much longer lived, much more ubiquitous. So suddenly the stigma, if you will, or at least the conspicuousness of working from home declined. Everybody then had to figure out technologically how to do it. And once you learn it, you don't unlearn it, and once you have the equipment you have it, or at least know what to get if you need it. And so there was this long-lasting legacy. Of course, working from home hasn't maintained the pandemic level peak, but we certainly haven't gone back to status quo ante, and I don't see that happening. But I do see even now, in 2025, these return-to-work orders still coming out. And so I think we will continue to see a slow erosion of remote work but again, still with a hybrid option there. I think companies are trying to get the best of both, and there seems to be always employees wanting at least a bit more. The Stanford data suggests that on average, employees want to work half a day more a week at home than employers want them to.
Bill Fulton
So on work from home, the difference between employers’ and employees’ expectations is a half a day a week.
Pat Mokhtarian
And that's apparently been fairly stable. What I'm curious about is, over time, how much “self-sorting” will go on? For example, Georgia Tech just issued a return-to-work order for the fall – they basically expect everybody to live in the region and show up every day. Whereas during the pandemic, you were hiring people way off yonder, and in many cases it was working just fine. Well, that door is slamming shut as far as Georgia Tech is concerned. The word on the street is that we may lose something like 15% of our staff over this.
Pat Mokhtarian’s “communications pie” from 1990, where the solid lines represent one point in time, and the dashed lines represent a later point in time.
Bill Fulton
Really? Because they've all moved. They've moved somewhere else.
Pat Mokhtarian
They've moved somewhere else, or they have a terrible commute. This is Atlanta, for heaven's sake.
Administrative staff live 20, 30 miles out to afford a nice house with the yard for their kids. So their commute can be a miserable 45 minutes or an hour in stop-and-go traffic. And boy, you get used to only doing that twice a week, and then you're told to go back to five times, that doesn't sit well.
I believe there's still going to be this self-sorting of employees who are going to look for work-from-home-friendly organizations, and organizations who are going to look for people who are fine not working from home, until there's some kind of equilibration. So I think we'll still see a bit of churn between employees seeking what they want and employers trying to enforce what they want.
Bill Fulton
I was reading recently that there may be now a decline, one might call it, in Zoomtowns – towns that really grew or became more active because of remote employees during COVID might actually decline a bit as people realize, “Oh, I can't live hundreds of miles away from my workplace anymore.” Maybe we're going to have some Zoom-less towns in the future.
Pat Mokhtarian
One of the things I wish I could study, but I just don't know how to get a good sample, is this long-distance commuting or long-distance teleworking, depending on how you look at it. I know anecdotally it happens. I know multiple people doing it and multiple organizations offering it where you can live wherever you want and you fly to a “central” or “designated” workplace once a year or once a quarter. I want to know how many people are doing this, what mode do they use to make that infrequent commute, and how does that trade off against their ground travel for the counterfactual, normal commute that they would've made otherwise?
Bill Fulton
If you drive seven miles to work every day versus flying from one part of the country to another once a quarter or once a month or something, what’s the footprint? Is that a net increase or decrease in travel?
Pat Mokhtarian
And don’t forget carbon emissions.
Bill Fulton
It sounds like the big question, which you addressed earlier, is, we've seen this connection between travel and telecommunications now for 180 years and it's never been broken. And so is it being broken now? And I think what you're saying is we don't quite know yet.
Pat Mokhtarianrian
It may be weakening, but again, I'm resistant to the idea that it’s altogether broken. Show me, because the self-reinforcing linkages are pretty strong and robust in my view. Again, I think a lot is tied up in economics. If transportation becomes quite expensive, then telecommunications becomes a pretty decent second-best, and then I see substitution. Sure. But if I can afford to travel, telecom's not always going to be the first best.
Of course, telecom saves time, saves money, allows more things to get done. So it's not that travel is always going to win, but maybe we have a certain travel budget, whether with respect to time, energy, money or some combination of those, and if it gets too expensive on any of those dimensions, we're going to be unsatisfied at not being able to travel as much as we’d like.
Bill Fulton
But it sounds like there is some evidence at least that the relationship between telecommunications and surface transportation might be changing.
Pat Mokhtarian
That seems to be the case. Now, again, I'm not sure even about the ground VMT statistics staying relatively flat indefinitely. If we're now at stability, if you will, plateauing in terms of traditional VMT growth factors (suburbanization, women in the workforce, and so forth), is the per-capita demand for travel still going to grow? Good question. If the economy stays rocky or worse, then yes, we could see the plateau continue. But if we have more boom years like we did in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, I'm guessing, again, that travel will go up. I feel like there are always enough lower-income people who have a suppressed demand for travel that if incomes rise, then they'll express that suppressed demand in traveling.
Bill Fulton
As people move up the economic ladder, they probably travel more, right?
Pat Mokhtarian
Correct.
Bill Fulton
And are the higher-income people topped out?
Pat Mokhtarian
Well, again, you can always have a more luxurious vacation …
Bill Fulton
Or a longer one.
Pat Mokhtarian
Exactly. Or more often, et cetera. So again, there may be a budget for some people such that they’d say, I don't care how wealthy I am, I'm not going to travel more than that, but for many people that seems unlikely.
Bill Fulton
I saw somebody make a funny comment about the new Four Seasons movie by Tina Fey who said, “How in the world can they afford four vacations in nine months?” Because every season they go on a vacation. That's the whole theme of the movie.
Anyway, could we return to one of the most fascinating things about your work, which is your belief that people are hardwired to travel. And I think there's two different aspects of that, at least in my mind. One is the need to move, literally move, but the other is a need to experience travel and experience different places and different scenery. All that is hardwired in us. It's just who we are. And you're not going to get rid of that.
Pat Mokhtarian
There's a great book called Quest by Charles Pasternak, who's the nephew of Boris Pasternak, the author best known for Doctor Zhivago. I haven't read it in a while, but he's a biochemist and a wide-ranging thinker. He talks about the need to “quest” among all kinds of animals as kind of an evolutionary imperative, if you will. Does “information gathering” allow us to find potential sources of water when ours is about to dry up or sources of food when new predatory animals take away what we used to eat? So maybe this idea is genetically hardwired from millions of years ago, that when we travel, we absorb information about the world, we tuck away useful bits of knowledge that might come in handy for survival down the road. So I think that's part of it as well.
Bill Fulton
And it's interesting that even today, to some extent, although different types of travel are substituting for each other, telecommunications actually provides us with more information about travel opportunities -- and as we talked about before, it actually facilitates travel so you can go somewhere else and work remotely. I just think that's a fascinating set of interactions, and you've devoted your whole life to trying to unravel all that. That's pretty impressive. What do you think, if you want to look forward, say five years, so we're then eight, 10 years past the pandemic, what would you like to try to unravel in the next few years about what's going on?
Pat Mokhtarian
Well, should we talk about autonomous vehicles [AVs]? That's another game changer. They're here – Waymo in Phoenix, San Francisco, LA, Austin, Atlanta… We're inching our way up to full autonomy – we're not there yet, but it seems more likely than it used to for a long time. AVs were 10 years away for decades. But AVs lower the friction of travel, and therefore make it easier to go longer distances.
Bill Fulton
So autonomous vehicles could increase travel.
Pat Mokhtarian
Oh, I fully expect them to – again, unless we price travel out of reach.
Bill Fulton
Why is it that with the friction and so forth, that autonomous vehicles would likely increase travel?
Pat Mokhtarian
A lot of people seem to think we'll just replace the trips we make now. They also think we’ll just hail them on demand, an autonomous Uber. But I've had to wait too long for an Uber too many times – I want one I can count on being available the minute I want it. So if they're affordable, people are going to want to own one. And then, as my colleague says, why should I pay $800 a year for parking on campus? I'll just have my AV bring me to campus, go back home, pick me up in the afternoon, then go back home again.
So you'll have all these zero occupant vehicle trips – again, unless we price such trips high enough. So suddenly that vehicle is making two round-trip commutes a day instead of just one. And thus, again, we won’t just have substitution of current human-driven trips with AV trips – we’ll have generation of new travel as well. Imagine on a weeknight, instead of going to dinner with my partner at a nearby neighborhood restaurant, we say, “Oh, we just heard this fancy new restaurant opened up 50 miles away by Lake Lanier up there in Georgia. Let's go there, because after all, we can do our last hour-and-a-half of work in the car on the way up.”
Bill Fulton
And you don't have to worry about drinking and driving.
Pat Mokhtarian
And then on the way back, we'll watch TV or maybe we'll make love in the car, and suddenly it becomes feasible to do all kinds of things while in motion that we previously only did while stationary. That further reduces the friction of travel, which makes more and longer trips more attractive.
Bill Fulton
Those would be less would less wearing if you're not driving. And more productive, you're doing other things.
Pat Mokhtarian
Exactly – but I'm trying to take a liberal view of what we mean by productive, because at first I was thinking, “Oh, everybody's going to want to work on the journey like I do.” But “productive” is in the eye of the beholder. Some literature uses the term “worthwhile,” which I think is a good way to put it. Your travel time can become worthwhile to you in a way that right now, may often seem wasted.
A good thought experiment is: if you could teleport yourself there instantaneously, would you? That helps disentangle the value of the trip itself from the value of simply being at the desired destination.
For many trips, you would say, “Oh sure, let me teleport myself.” But if I want to take a train ride through the Swiss Alps, why would I want to teleport myself?
Bill Fulton
The train ride is the journey.
Pat Mokhtarian
It’s interesting – I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but AVs can support both answers to the teleportation question. Like you say, riding on the train in the Swiss Alps is part of the experience, and similarly, riding in an AV allows you to experience more of the joy of traveling than if you had to pay attention to driving. But as far as going to the restaurant 50 miles away, if you don't have to drive yourself, and if you’re able to do a lot of things that you would have been doing if stationary, then that’s more like teleporting because your travel time is more like regular, “other” time than wasted transition time. And, on the other hand, in some cases the ride to the restaurant itself may be scenic and you’ll enjoy the sunset.
Bill Fulton
Pat, thanks for being with me today.
Pat Mokhtarian
Thanks for having me – it was fun!