Analysis of vehicle ownership evolution in montreal, canada using pseudo panel analysis

Doctoral Student

Department of Civil Engineering & Applied Mechanics

McGill University

Tel: 1-438-820-2880, Fax: 1-514-398-7361

Email: sabreena.anowar@mail.mcgill.ca

Assistant Professor

Department of Civil Engineering & Applied Mechanics

McGill University

Tel: 1-514-398-6823, Fax: 1-514-398-7361

Email: naveen.eluru@mcgill.ca

Assistant Professor

Department of Civil Engineering & Applied Mechanics

McGill University

Tel: 1-514-398-6589, Fax: 1-514-398-7361

Email: luis.miranda-moreno@mcgill.ca

Submission Date: August 1, 2013

* Corresponding author

1. INTRODUCTION

Given the increasing vehicle ownership, it is no surprise that the proportion of individuals using the auto mode for travel has increased from 68 percent in 1992 to 74 percent in 2005 as observed from the time-use data from the Canadian General Social Survey (Turcotte, 2008). The negative externalities of the resulting traffic congestion include travel time delays, financial losses (excess fuel usage and lost work time), and rising air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions (Transport Canada, 2006). Not surprisingly, the wide ranging implications of vehicle ownership decisions have resulted in the emergence of vast literature on this topic over the past two decades. The earlier studies examined household vehicle ownership defined as fleet size, vehicle type and usage. The main objective of these studies was to examine the influence of different exogenous variables such as household socio-demographics, land use and urban form attributes, transit and infrastructure characteristics on household vehicle ownership. These earlier research efforts offer useful insights on the role of exogenous variables on vehicle ownership decision processes. Typically, these studies employ cross-sectional databases that provide a snapshot of vehicle ownership. However, to study the evolution of vehicle ownership over time longitudinal databases that track vehicle ownership decisions of the same households across multiple years are likely to be more informative (Woldeamanuel et al., 2009). Unfortunately, compiling such detailed data is prohibitively expensive and provides many challenges associated with respondent fatigue and retention (Hanly and Dargay, 2000).

The current study is primarily motivated from the need to address this data availability challenge. Specifically, we intend to develop vehicle ownership frameworks employing cross sectional databases compiled over multiple time points. The availability of multiple cross sectional datasets for different years provides a useful compromise between a single year cross sectional dataset and a truly longitudinal dataset compiled across multiple years. Though the multiple waves are not compiled based on the same set of households, they still provide us an opportunity to examine the impact of technology, altering perceptions of road and transit infrastructure, changing social and cultural trends on vehicle ownership (see for example Sanko, 2013; Dargay, 2002; Dargay and Vythoulkas, 1999; for studies employing pseudo-panel data for examining travel behavior dimensions). Further, pooled datasets allow us to identify how the impact of exogenous variables has altered with time. For example, with improved perception of public transit, impact of a metro stop near the household might affect vehicle ownership reduction more in 2010 compared to its corresponding impact in 2000. Policy makers can utilize this information to propose mechanisms that will target vehicle ownership reduction.

Data pooling of different respondents across multiple waves offers unique methodological challenges. The methodology should recognize the differences across multiple time points adequately. Specifically, the choice process for the respondents in a particular year might be influenced by various observed and unobserved attributes (Train, 2009; pp. 40-42). For example, if there is a significant spike in households with multiple employed individuals (from say 1995 to 2005) the vehicle ownership pattern might alter substantially across these two databases. This is an instance of how observed attributes affect vehicle ownership decision process. The outcome based models can accommodate such transitions reasonably through appropriate model specification (“number of workers in a household” variable). However, say we are interested in measuring the impact of growing environmental consciousness between 2000 and 2010 on vehicle ownership. This is the case of an unobserved variable (as it will be very hard to define exogenous variable of this type) specific to the study time period on the decision process. The accommodation of such unobserved effects becomes crucial in the analysis process. In our study, we implement modeling approaches that simultaneously accommodates for the influence of observed and unobserved attributes on the vehicle ownership decision framework across multiple time points.

This study aims at investigating the factors affecting car ownership and its evolutions in recent years in the Greater Montreal Area (GMA) using three origin-destination (O-D) surveys from 1998, 2003 and 2008. The study approach is built on the Generalized Ordered Logit (GOL) framework. The GOL framework relaxes the restrictive assumption of the traditional ordered response models (monotonic effect of exogenous variables) while simultaneously recognizing the inherent ordering of the vehicle ownership variable (information that unordered model alternatives fail to consider). Further, to incorporate the effect of observed and unobserved temporal effects, we specifically consider two versions of the GOL model – the mixed GOL model and the scaled GOL model. The two variants differ in the way they incorporate the influence of unobserved attributes within the decision process. We estimate both models and employ data fit comparison metrics to determine the appropriate model structure. The model specification is undertaken so as to shed light on how the changes to Montreal region across the study years and boroughs has affected household vehicle ownership.

The remainder of the paper is organized in the following order. Section 2 presents a discussion of earlier research studies on car ownership and its evolution. In Section 3, details of the econometric modeling approach employed in our study are discussed. Section 4 describes the main data sources and the sample formation procedure. Empirical results are presented and discussed in Section 5. Elasticity effects and policy analysis results are also included in the same section. Finally, we summarize the major findings of the research in Section 6.

The earlier literature on car ownership has been focussed on examining car ownership at an aggregate level (Holtzclaw et al., 2002; Clark, 2007). These studies analyse the ownership decision process at the national, regional or zonal level. Despite many advantages, aggregate analysis fails to capture the underlying behavioural mechanisms that actually guide the household decision process. On the other hand, disaggregate models, in which the decision makers are individual households, alleviate many of these difficulties and can lead to more precise, detailed and policy relevant findings (Eluru and Bhat, 2007; Chang and Mannering, 1999). Therefore, more recent studies have focussed on examining the car ownership decisions at a disaggregate level (household level).

Most disaggregate models found in the literature of vehicle ownership are developed using cross-sectional data. The methodological approaches applied in these studies range from simple linear regression to complex econometric formulation taking into account a rich set of covariates (Brownstone and Golob, 2009). These snapshot models of vehicle ownership ignore the inherent vehicle ownership evolution process that is affected by life cycle changes (such as the birth of a child, changes to marital status) and/or land use and urban infrastructure and perception (such as introduction of improved transit facilities or environmental awareness). In order to capture these behavioural changes across time, researchers have suggested the development and use of longitudinal studies (Kitamura and Bunch, 1990; Kitamura, 2008).

Pendyala et al. (1995) investigated the changes in the relationship between household income and vehicle ownership using longitudinal data from the Dutch National Mobility Panel Survey. They developed ordered probit models for six time points to monitor the evolution of income elasticities of car ownership over time. Their analysis results indicated that elasticity of car ownership changes over time. Ordered probit framework was also used by Hanly and Dargay (2000) for studying car ownership levels of British households. In their study, location of household in the region was found as an important determinant of vehicle fleet size. Specifically, ownership levels in rural areas would be higher due to lack of other alternative modes. In another study, Nobile et al. (1997) proposed a random effects multinomial probit model of household car ownership level using the same longitudinal data that was used by Pendyala et al. (1995). According to the authors, most of the variability in the observed choices could be attributed to between-household differences rather than within-household random disturbances. They found that residential location, number of license holders in the household, household income, number of adults and number of employed adults were important factors affecting vehicle ownership decisions. More recently, Woldeamanuel et al. (2009) examined the variation in car ownership across time and households using German Mobility Panel survey data of 11 years from 1996 to 2006. In addition to exploring the effect of the traditional socio-demographic and transit characteristics on vehicle ownership, they also examined people’s perception of parking difficulties and satisfaction with the existing public transportation facilities provided on car owning characteristics of households. Along the same line, Nolan (2010) proposed a binary random effects model to analyze the car ownership decision of Irish households for the period 1995 to 2001. A highly significant state dependence suggested that there is strong habitual effect or persistence in household car ownership levels from one year to the next. In terms of income effect, the paper reported that fixed income exerts greater influence on the ownership level decision than current income. Similar persistence effect was also reported by Bjorner and Leth-Petersen (2007) for Danish households.

As is evident from the literature review, very few dynamic panel models can be found in the literature. The studies discussed above consider the evolution of vehicle fleet that allows analysts to see how life cycle changes in a household and existing fleet influence vehicle ownership decisions. Of course, it is evident that such models require longitudinal data. To address the shortage of longitudinal data availability, a pseudo-panel approach – a process by which repeated cross sectional databases are merged to generate a panel (Deaton, 1985) - is used by the researchers to estimate car ownership models. For instance, Dargay and Vythoulkas (1999) compiled data from several cross sectional databases of United Kingdom Family Expenditure Survey. The authors estimated random effects linear regression models to explore the effects of income, costs of car ownership and use, public transport fares, and the socio-demographic characteristics of the households on car ownership levels while controlling for age of the household head. In a subsequent study, Dargay (2002) extended her work and explored the differences in car ownership and its determining factors for households living in rural, urban and ‘other’ areas. More recently, Matas and Raymond (2008) developed ordered probit and multinomial logit models to examine the vehicle ownership growth in Spain using household level data at three points in time: 1980, 1990 and 2000. Their results indicated that the car ownership levels of households residing in large urban areas are sensitive to the quality of public transport facilities. In addition, growth in income and increase in working and non-working adults are the main explanatory factors of car ownership growth over time.
2.1 Current study in context
Earlier research employing longitudinal data or pseudo-panel data study car ownership using linear regression (random effects), ordered response (ordered probit) and unordered response models (multinomial logit and multinomial probit with random effects). All the studies employing ordered response models ignore the potential impact of unobserved time specific attributes on the decision process. The studies that explore these unobserved effects (Dargay and Vythoulkas, 1999; Dargay, 2002; Nobile et al., 1997) employ either linear regression frameworks or multinomial probit models. The applicability of linear regression and unordered approaches to study vehicle ownership is arguable as the vehicle ownership variable is an ordinal discrete variable. A more appropriate framework to examine the ownership variable is the ordered response framework. However, one important limitation of the ordered model is that it constrains the impact of the exogenous variables to be the monotonic for all alternatives.

To overcome this issue, researchers have resorted to the unordered response models that allow the impact of exogenous variables to vary across car ownership levels (Bhat and Pulugurta, 1998; Potoglou and Kanaroglou, 2008b; Potoglou and Susilo, 2008). However, the increased flexibility from the unordered models is obtained at the cost of neglecting the inherent ordering of the car ownership levels. The recently proposed GOL model relaxes the monotonic effect of exogenous variables of the traditional ordered models while still recognizing the inherent ordered nature of the variable (Eluru et al., 2008). Recent evidence comparing the performance of GOL model with its unordered counterparts has established the GOL model as an appropriate framework to study ordered variables (Eluru, 2013; Yasmin and Eluru, 2013). Hence, in our study, we employ the GOL framework to study car ownership. To elaborate, we contribute to literature by employing two variants - the Scaled GOL model and Mixed GOL model - of the GOL model to capture the impact of observed and unobserved attributes on car ownership levels for our analysis. The scaled GOL model allows us to accommodate the impact of unobserved time points in the modeling approach while the MGOL model is even more flexible allowing the impact of observed attributes to vary across the population (in addition to accommodating impact of unobserved time points). The appropriate framework for analysis is determined based on data fit measures.

Further, the studies undertaken so far employ a very small set of exogenous variables; while none of them explore the impact of land use and urban from on vehicle ownership adequately. We study car ownership evolution in Montreal region using an exhaustive set of exogenous variables with a particular focus on land use and urban form characteristics. We also incorporate the temporal changes to borough location impact on the choice process. As mentioned earlier, in addition to the observed attributes, the study also considers the impact of unobserved attributes on the decision process.

In summary, the current study contributes to literature in two ways. First, methodologically, the study employs an approach to stitch together multiple cross-sectional datasets to generate a rich pooled dataset that will allow us to study the evolution of vehicle ownership. Towards this end, a scaled GOL and Mixed GOL models are estimated. Second, empirically, the study contributes to vehicle ownership literature by estimating the GOL models using an exhaustive set of exogenous variables including household socio-demographics, transit accessibility measures and land use characteristics. Further, observed and unobserved effects of the year of data collection (and their interaction with other observed variables) are explicitly considered in our analysis enabling us to examine trends in variable impacts across the years.

If we consider the car ownership levels of households (k) to be ordered,

(1)

q.

(2)

The generalized ordered response model is a flexible form of the traditional OL model that relaxes the restriction of constant threshold across population. The GOL model represents the threshold parameters as a linear function of exogenous variables (Srinivasan, 2002, Eluru et al., 2008). In order to ensure the ordering of observed discrete vehicle ownership levels , we employ the following parametric form as employed by Eluru et al. (2008):

(3)

For both OL and GOL model, the probability expression of Equation 2, is derived by assuming that the variance in utility over different car ownerships across years is unity. However, we can introduce a scale parameter (, which would scale the coefficients to reflect the variance of the unobserved portion of the utility for each time point. The probability expression can then be written as:

(4)

The mixed GOL accommodates unobserved heterogeneity in the effect of exogenous variables on household car ownership levels in both the latent car owning propensity function and the threshold functions (Srinivasan, 2002, Eluru et al., 2008). The equation system for MGOL model can be expressed as:

		(5)
		(6)