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Modeling car ownership and use in a developing country context with informal public transportation

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Abstract

Car ownership and use is a main contributor to the deterioration of air quality in cities and to global warming. There is thus a pressing need to understand their determinants in this era of increasing demand for mobility. This paper studies car ownership and use decisions in a car-dominant developing country context, and quantifies the effect of public transportation availability on these decisions. A discrete–continuous modeling framework that estimates car ownership and use simultaneously is presented. People’s latent attitudes towards public transportation and the private car are also assumed to influence these decisions.

The model is applied to the case of Lebanon, a developing country characterized by a high car ownership rate, a high percentage of trips made by car, and an informal public transportation system. Five policy scenarios involving potential improvements to the public transportation system, land use densification, or increase in fuel taxes were tested. The findings show that the current public transportation accessibility level has a minor impact on car ownership, but none on car usage. Only if major improvements to the public transportation services are enacted would a decrease in car ownership and usage be achieved. In such a case, model outcomes show that car ownership will be reduced in households with two cars by 5.88% and usage in general will be reduced by 15.22%. As a result, emissions and fuel consumption will be reduced by around 15%. Densification of zones outside Municipal Beirut is also a promising strategy for reducing car usage.

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Notes

  1. Red plate holders are allowed to operate, without geographic constraint, specific modes of public transport service.

  2. The survey questionnaire is available upon request.

  3. The effects of policies 3 and 5 are marginally different from the effect of policy 1.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Munib and Angela Masri Institute of Energy and Natural Resources, the Dean’s Office of the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the American University of Beirut. We are thankful for Rami Semaan from TMS Consult for providing the population and employment data, for SETS for providing data on the bus lines, and for Rimah Halabi and Marianne Jreige for conducting the field work related to the bus data. The authors also thank Issam Srour for his feedback on this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, American University of Beirut, 125 Irani-Oxy, Riad El-Solh, PO Box 11-0236, Beirut, 1107 2020, Lebanon

    Lara Al Otary

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, American University of Beirut, 527 Bechtel, Riad El-Solh, PO Box 11-0236, Beirut, 1107 2020, Lebanon

    Maya Abou-Zeid

  3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, American University of Beirut, 534 Bechtel, Riad El-Solh, PO Box 11-0236, Beirut, 1107 2020, Lebanon

    Isam Kaysi

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  1. Lara Al Otary
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Correspondence to Maya Abou-Zeid.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 10.

Table 10 Estimation results of the discrete–continuous model (Measurement Model)
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Al Otary, L., Abou-Zeid, M. & Kaysi, I. Modeling car ownership and use in a developing country context with informal public transportation. Transportation 49, 1–36 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-020-10161-5

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