Analysis of car ownership motivation in Tokyo for sustainable mobility service and urban development

Abstract

Recently, several big cities have been planning to ban private cars from city centers to reduce car use and ownership in urban areas. As an alternative, mobility services are expected to provide residents and visitors with the benefits of mobility beyond private cars. However, the development of mobility services has not led to a decrease in car ownership. In such a period of transformation, structurally understanding the essential factors affecting car ownership becomes an important research theme.In this study, several important findings were obtained by analyzing the motive structure of car ownership in 23 wards of Tokyo using structural equation modelling. The results showed that the strength of the emotional factor as a utility of owning a car was more than twice that of the convenience factor. Moreover, in the case that the focus was only on the convenience factor, the secondary utility of the car was considered to be more important than the primary utility of the means of transportation.These findings explained why the current mobility services have not appealed to private car users. Furthermore, since these results are output of structural relationship with social attributes and the economic awareness of respondents, this framework can be effectively used for policy design and alternative mobility service planning to reconstruct the urban transportation system.