Modelling residential mobility decision and its impact on car ownership and travel mode

Household residential relocation can happen at different scales - local, regional national and international. The impacts of the different scales of residential relocation is likely to have varying impacts on mid-term (e.g. car or transit pass ownership) and day-to-day mobility decisions (e.g. mode choice for a specific trip for example). These mobility changes can be of different levels as well. For example, there are differences between the decision to transition from owning no car to one car and from one car to two cars. Identifying which factors affect the different magnitudes of mobility changes and quantifying the impact of various scales of residential relocation on these changes are crucial to better understanding of travel behaviour. The present study uses discrete choice models on revealed preference data to address these research questions. To complement the travel behaviour models, a residential relocation model has also been developed to predict the probability of a household to stay in the current location vs. to move locally, regionally or nationally at a given point of time.

Given that the residential relocations are rare events, the British household panel survey (BHPS) spanning 18 years has been used to model the choices made by the same households in terms of residential relocation, car ownership and commute mode of the household head. Our results indicate that sociodemographic characteristics, travel behaviour and life events of the households have a significant effect on relocation, car ownership and commute mode choice. As expected, the parameters of the car ownership and commute mode choice models vary significantly with the type of relocation. Further, the socio-demographic factors and life-events also have a varying impact on the scale of relocation. The residential relocation, car ownership and commute mode choice models developed in this research can be used to better predict the medium and long term changes in travel behaviour over course of time.