Modelling and Analysis of Car Ownership in Chilean Cities

Car ownership and household income are key aspects when modeling home-based trip production. This article deals with the first aspect, using a disaggregate approach to model this attribute. The main goal was to identify those aspects affecting household car ownership in the Chilean context, using cross section information for four cities. A binary choice structure was chosen to model the household car ownership based on data availability. Data came from the Origin Destination surveys carried out by the Chilean Transport Investment Planning Office. Results show that main factors affecting the probability of having at least one car by household, for all four cities, are: household income, number of women and men holding a driving license, and gender and occupation of household head. In spite of models are able to replicate car possession by household, there might be other aspects affecting car ownership: public transport network density and location of activities developed by the household members, for instance.