Car ownership and access to jobs in Spain

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2009

Subject Area

place - urban, mode - car

Keywords

Urban structure, Spain, Households, Employment, Automobile ownership, Accessibility

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of urban structure on household car ownership in a context of rapid job and population decentralization. The authors capture the effect of urban structure through a measure of job accessibility to employment by public transport. An ordered probit explaining the number of cars per household is estimated as a function of individual, household and spatial variables. The data used in the analysis come from the Spanish Institute of Statistics' 2001 Micro-census for the areas of Barcelona and Madrid. The results show that spatial variables play a significant role in explaining the probability of car ownership. The authors provide the car ownership elasticities with respect the job accessibility measure. Additionally, the authors carried out simulation exercises in which the expected number of vehicles decreases as accessibility improves.

Comments

Transportation Research Part A Home Page: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09658564

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