| Resumo: | The possibility of applying telecommunications to work at home is contemplated as an alternative that could help to ease current traffic congestion in large cities, alleviating both energy waste and air pollution problems. The expansion of telecommunications to offices and homes, and the growing availability of computers, printers, fax, etc., has fostered research for telecommuting arrangements. These arrangements include the encouragement to work at home as mentioned, the decentralization of the workplace by means of creating satellite offices, as well as the adoption of new structures at the job site to re-organize various management and staff assignments. The aim of this paper is to address the city government commuters’ behaviour to determine their availability for telecommuting in the Ottawa metropolitan area, in Ontario, Canada. In order to accomplish this, a methodology was devised for implementing four field surveys, two examining the commuting behaviour of the planning department’s management and staff and two more examining the commuting behaviour of the transportation department’s management and staff at the Ottawa Municipal Government. As expected the study revealed that the potential for telecommuting, measured in terms of telecommuting support from managers and telecommuting acceptance level by staff members, is significant: fifty per cent of the responding planning managers and approximately eighty-six per cent of their responding transportation peers supported the telecommuting arrangements. In their turn, forty-one per cent of the responding planning staff members showed a telecommuting acceptance level of 3.5 days a week (between 3-4 days) and approximately forty per cent of their responding transportation peers showed a telecommuting acceptance level of 2.0 days a week.
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