Digital lifestyles and mobility dynamics: Temporal and platform heterogeneity in vehicle travel

Working from home (WFH) and e-commerce are widely encouraged as practical tools to reduce congestion and environmental impacts. However, the persistence or rebound of vehicle travel following widespread digital adoption has created practical uncertainty, making it essential to understand how remote work and different e-commerce platforms reshape mobility patterns over time. This study investigates how digital lifestyles restructure regional mobility systems by examining the effect of WFH and e-commerce on residential vehicle miles traveled (VMT) across different temporal regimes. Drawing on Substitution–Complementarity Theory and Rebound Effect Theory, we conceptualize remote work and online consumption as activity-level and transaction-level mechanisms that reorganize the spatial distribution of mobility demand. Using a county-month panel constructed from Replica data, we find temporal instability and platform heterogeneity in regional digital mobility effects . County-level WFH prevalence negatively affects residential VMT in the pre-shock regime but positively affects it in the post-shock regime , consistent with a shift from substitution to rebound dynamics. E -commerce effects are platform-specific: the effect of county-level business-to-consumer (B2C) online retail activity shifts from negative to positive across regimes, whereas online-to-offline (O2O) restaurant activity negatively affects residential VMT in the post-shock regime. Interaction analyses further indicate that greater B2C intensity weakens, whereas greater O2O restaurant intensity strengthens, the positive effect of county-level WFH prevalence on residential VMT in the post-shock regime. Our findings thus urge managers to anticipate that long-term WFH may increase regional travel demand, while platform operators and logistics providers should adopt adaptive delivery and capacity strategies aligned with evolving digital mobility patterns.