Daily mobility patterns of small business owners and homeworkers in post-industrial cities

The rise of small businesses, self-employment, and homeworking are transforming traditional industrial ways of working. Our research fills a noticeable gap in the literature by using portable devices (i.e., smartphones) to capture individual mobility data on an understudied population group – small business owners (owner managers and self-employed with up to 49 employees) and whether they work from home in comparison with employees who work at their employer's premises or partly or mainly from home. We recorded week-long individual GPS data on 702 participants and derived a set of measures of daily mobility (number of trips, trip duration, trip distance, and maximum distance from home). Each measure is modelled against a range of individual and neighbourhood-level covariates. Our findings contrast with existing studies that suggest homeworking or self-employment may be associated with lower levels of daily mobility or with compensatory effects between work and non-work travel. Overall, our study points to higher levels of daily mobility of owners of small businesses and the self-employed in cities as they travel longer distances. Further, some homeworkers have on aggregate longer daily trip distances than ‘traditional’ premise-based employees. Most striking, female home-based business owners fall into this group. If homeworking is here to stay after the COVID-19 pandemic, we may see both increases and/or decreases of daily mobility depending on worker types and gender.