Abstract
Life course events can change household travel demand dramatically. Recent studies of car ownership have examined the impacts of life course events on the purchasing, replacing, and disposing of cars. However, with the increasing diversification of mobility tools, changing the fleet size is not the only option to adapt to the change caused by life course events. People have various options with the development of sustainable mobility tools including electric car, electric bike, and car sharing. In order to determine the impacts of life course events on car ownership and the decision of mobility tool type, a stated choice experiment was conducted. The experiment also investigated how the attributes of mobility tools related to the acceptance of them. Based on existing literature, we identified the attributes of mobility tools and several life course events which are considered to be influential in car ownership decision and new types of mobility tools choice. The error component random parameter logit model was estimated. The heterogeneity across people on current car and specific mobility tools are considered. The results indicate people incline not to sell their current car when they choose an electric bike or shared car. Regarding the life course events, baby birth increases the probability to purchase an additional car, while it decreases the probability to purchase an electric bike or joining a car sharing scheme. Moreover, the estimation of error components implies that there is unobserved heterogeneity across respondents on the sustainable mobility tools choice and the decision on household’s current car.
Highlights
Car ownership has been an important topic in transportation considering its close tie with the general urban problems, i.e., congestion, energy consumption, and pollution
The sustainable mobility tools should be considered in the analysis of the decision of car ownership and types of mobility tools
Most of the previous studies that have investigated the effects of life course events on a household’s car ownership used revealed preference data, which are difficult to collect for sustainable mobility tools
Summary
Car ownership has been an important topic in transportation considering its close tie with the general urban problems, i.e., congestion, energy consumption, and pollution. The decision related to a car is usually a mid-term to long-term decision, which is often treated as a part of life choices linking to one’s key events over a life course, such as job change, house (re)locations. Life course events may trigger the change of people’s need for a car, influencing the level of car ownership and travel behavior in general. With a relatively thin consideration of urban transition as a context, the majority of existing studies have investigated the impact of life course events on the ownership of conventional cars only. Analyzing the impacts of life course events without considering car sharing, electric cars (EVs), and electric bikes may be fragmentary because mobility options nowadays are diversified with increasing applications of shared and/or electric
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