Empirical Investigation of Household Vehicle Type Choice Decisions

Automobile ownership models are an integral part of comprehensive transportation modeling systems. Recent work and ongoing advances in the area of activity-based travel demand modeling have recognized the need for increased experimentation with automobile choice models. On the other hand, while automobiles are very important in people's everyday lives, they also have a serious impact on the environment. This impact occurs at the micro level (pollution) as well as the macro level (emission of greenhouse gases and global warming). Such impacts have led to increased interest in reducing motor vehicle emissions. A household automobile type choice model was developed at a disaggregate level. The model can provide a direct forecast of consumer demand for personal-use vehicles given the available choices. A well-developed form of discrete choice modeling techniques, the nested logit model, was used to investigate the process of household automobile type choice decisions given that a transaction has occurred.