Empirical Analyses of Car Ownership and Car use in Sweden

The purpose of this report is to describe and analyse how individual car ownership and car use in Sweden are affected by costs, income, sex and the place of residence of the individual and further to investigate whether inhabitants of rural areas close to urban areas or sparsely populated areas are more sensitive to costs and income with regard to car ownership and car use than other individuals in Sweden. The report uses register data for the whole of the Swedish population, meter readings from the vehicle inspection, and the area categorisation of the National Rural Development Agency: urban area, rural area close to an urban area and sparsely populated area. Some of the new descriptive results are that: inhabitants of urban areas own and use cars to a lesser extent than inhabitants of rural areas. The difference in driven distances, however, is small. The difference between rural areas close to urban areas and sparsely populated areas is less. In the model analyses we find small differences between the area types in the sensitivity of the use of privately-owned cars due to changes in disposable income and costs. In the analysis of the model for individual car ownership the most important result is that car ownership in Sweden is slow to change. The most important factor to explain car ownership in a particular year is whether the individual owned or did not own a car the previous year. Inhabitants of rural areas are slightly less inclined to cease car ownership and more inclined to increase car ownership to several cars compared with comparable individuals in urban areas. Men are also considerably more inclined to acquire a car when they do not own one than women, and this probability is greater in rural areas for both sexes. Changes in income are estimated to have negligible effects on car ownership. Changes in cost have both expected and unexpected effects on the likelihood of car ownership levels.