Abstract
China is expected to have more children now that its family planning policy has been relaxed, and the influence of children on transportation and sustainability should not be neglected. This study uses econometric methods to explore the impact that the presence of children has on household car ownership, car-travel behavior of family members, and variability in their car-use frequency across weekdays and weekends. Models are estimated using multi-day travel patterns imputed from GPS-enabled smartphone data collected in Shanghai, China. Results indicate that: (1) households with children have more private cars than those without children, and the presence of preschoolers and pupils both increase families’ demand for car ownership; (2) travel behavior of people from households with children is influenced subtly by the children’s presence, which leads them to prefer to travel by car, although the presence of retired or unemployed household members can weaken that influence; and (3) car-travel frequency of individuals is significantly different between weekdays and weekends, with the presence of pupils in the household diminishing that variability and the presence of preschoolers enlarging it. Policymakers and transportation planners should be concerned about these issues and take appropriate measures.
Highlights
China has relaxed its family planning policy gradually during the last few years
Controlling for variables of related factors, such as the number of bikes owned by the family, we find that families with children have more private cars, which agrees with the finding of Shen and his coauthors [37]
When studying the influence of children of different ages on car ownership, as column (b) in Table 2 shows, we find that the presence of preschoolers and pupils showed a significant, positive correlation with the number of private cars
Summary
China has relaxed its family planning policy gradually during the last few years. Since 2015, each couple has been permitted to have two children, and at the first session of the Thirteenth National People’s Congress in 2018 a delegate proposed ending the family planning restriction. Due to child-related matters, car purchases, or more taxi trips, may lead family members to be more accustomed to traveling by car with or without children If this speculation is correct, the process of China’s sustainable development will be influenced greatly by the additional children, and that will in turn affect the children’s growing environment and living conditions [1]. Kang and Scott [21] explored day-to-day variability in time use for household members, while involving their interactive variations Xianyu and her coauthors [22] are the first to apply a unique combination of methods and multi-day activity-travel data to analyze the degree of variability between travel days in China.
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