LOCATION, HOUSING, AUTOMOBILE OWNERSHIP, AND MODE TO WORK: A JOINT CHOICE MODEL

Household location decisions are closely related to other choices of housing, automobile ownership, and mode to work. This paper describes a model that considers these long-run decisions, termed the mobility bundle, as jointly determined, thus eliminating the need for an arbitary set of assumptions about a sequence of choices. The model developed is based on disaggregate choice theory. Each potential location-housing-automobile ownership-mode to work combination is a distinct alternative, of which only one is selected by each house-hold. The basic methodology used is the multinomial logit model. A sample of skilled, single worker households working and residing in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area in 1968 was used to estimate the model. The variables used to describe each alternative included locational attributes, housing attributes, transportation level of service to work, spatial opportunities for shopping trips, automobile ownership attributes, and the socioeconomic characteristics of the household. Even with the relatively small sample used, a wide range of behavioral effects were measured. It is concluded that models such as the one described here could replace existing model systems used to forecast residential location patterns. The increase in behavioral content such models permit would allow credible work-trip forecasts to be made as a part of land use forecasting. /Author/