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Determinants of mobility resource ownership in Switzerland: changes between 2000 and 2010

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An Erratum to this article was published on 18 May 2016

This article has been updated

Abstract

The future development in mobility resource ownership is of great interest as the individual mobility behavior has critical impacts on transport infrastructure, land use, energy consumption, and environmental issues, such as greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollutants. Analysis and forecasts of mobility resource ownership as needed for example in transport modelling or forecast studies, however, usually employ data of the latest national travel surveys available. Therefore, changes in mobility resource ownership over time are often ignored. Estimating logit-based decision models on the large scale Swiss national travel survey data for 2000 and 2010, the study identifies determinants of mobility resource ownership for the main mobility resources (driving licenses, car availability, general abonnement travel tickets, and half fare travel tickets), identifying also significant changes over time. The predictor variables comprise socio-economic and socio-demographic variables, spatial structure features, and mobility resource specific characteristics. Our results show that age, sex, income, the size of the community, and geographical region influence mobility resource ownership in both years, 2000 and 2010. Furthermore, car-based and public transport-based mobility resources are substitutes for each other. Between 2000 and 2010 a behavioral change is observed for selected sub-populations: In 2010 women and persons above 40 years old are more likely to own a driving license and have a car available than in 2000. In addition, the positive effect of income on driving license and car ownership becomes smaller over time. Finally the previously neglected variables, such as household structure, employment status and level of education are found to be significant in the explanation of mobility resource ownership.

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Change history

  • 18 May 2016

    An erratum to this article has been published.

Notes

  1. A nested logit structure with one nest for all alternatives including car availability and one nest for all alternatives without a car turned out to be insignificant.

  2. These results are available upon request.

  3. For 2010 the correlation between center and travel time public is −0.6 and between center and travel time car −0.7. Both correlations are highly significant. When entered separately, the following significant effects are observed: living in the center increases the probability of owning a GA and increased public travel time leads to a lower probability to own a GA. The latter effect is also significant for Halbtax ownership. These effects are coherent with theory.

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Acknowledgments

The opinions in this article are those of the authors only and should not be attributed to their organizations. A previous version of this work was presented at the Swiss Transport Research Conference 2015 (STRC). We thank participants of this conference and three anonymous referees for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Swiss Federal Office for Spatial Development, 3003, Berne, Switzerland

    Matthias Kowald, Nicole Mathys & Andreas Justen

  2. University of Neuchâtel, Eichbühlstrasse 64, 8004, Zurich, Switzerland

    Barbara Kieser

  3. University of Neuchâtel, 2000, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Nicole Mathys

Authors
  1. Matthias Kowald
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  2. Barbara Kieser
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  3. Nicole Mathys
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  4. Andreas Justen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthias Kowald.

Additional information

An erratum to this article is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-016-9704-8.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 Summary statistics for selected variables, 2000
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Table 5 Multinomial logit model on mobility resource ownership in the year 2010 (std.-errors are printed in brackets)
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Kowald, M., Kieser, B., Mathys, N. et al. Determinants of mobility resource ownership in Switzerland: changes between 2000 and 2010. Transportation 44, 1043–1065 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-016-9693-7

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