Carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood choice: a mixed logit model

Abstract

Carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood is an emerging concept in urban development that combines carsharing, sustainable transportation-residential planning, and attractive housing to reduce private car use and improve neighbourhood quality. To investigate residents’ preferences for such neighbourhoods, a stated choice experiment was designed that systematically varied attributes of carsharing-facilitating neighbourhoods to elicit their utility for people with a particular socio-demographic profile. The survey was conducted among residents who currently live in densely populated urban areas in The Netherlands. In total, 610 valid responses were obtained for analysis. To derive the utility of carsharing-facilitating neighbourhoods of a particular profile, a mixed logit model was estimated. Results indicate that the utility of a carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood primarily depends on carsharing cost, required carsharing booking time, green space density, housing costs, housing type, housing size and housing building year. Besides, the utility varies with socio-demographic characteristics, such as age, household composition, net monthly income, work status and education level. The estimated results can help policymakers and real estate developers understand the contribution of particular factors to the utility of carsharing-facilitating neighbourhoods, and determine target groups to develop implementation strategies.

Individuals who have zero-interest in living in carsharing-facilitating neighbourhoods: a case study in the Netherlands

“…Carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood is one of the newly proposed concepts to fulfil this goal. It is defined as a scheme orchestrated by local governments/planning authorities, typically in the context of public-private partnerships to combine carsharing, sustainable transportation-residential planning and attractive housing elements to reduce private car ownership and improve neighbourhood environments (Wang, Dane, and Timmermans 2020). The concept carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood has overlapped with the old concept car-free/car-reduced neighbourhood, because carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood also complies with sustainable transportation and land use planning (e.g.…”

“…carsharing service in carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood is ideally centrally offered by the neighbourhood management office and guaranteed by a platform technology for easy access. Carsharing is supposed to cooperate with sustainable transportation-residential land use planning to accelerate private car substitution and promote sustainable neighbourhood development (Wang, Dane, and Timmermans 2020). This feature makes carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood distinct from traditional car-free/car-reduced neighbourhood where carsharing played an auxiliary role (i.e.…”

“…), and innovatively proposed a wide provision of carsharing on the siteone shared-car for every three homes (Herranz 2020). Wang, Dane, and Timmermans (2020) have done the research regarding carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood preferences based on a stated choice experiment, in which respondents were repeatedly (eight times) asked to choose a preferred carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood from two alternatives or choose the 'I like neither' option. The research found that carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood utility is significantly influenced by stated-choice physical environment attributes (e.g.…”

“…age, household composition, net monthly income, work status and education level). Although the research of Wang, Dane, and Timmermans (2020) has provided an understanding of influential factors on carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood utility, the research did not pay attention to the samples who constantly chose 'I like neither' in the given eight choice tasks (i.e. individuals who have zero-interest in living carsharing-facilitating neighbourhoods), and the underlying influential factors on their choices.…”

“…In this research, we thus aim to supplement answers to these questions. To fulfil this goal, further analysis is conducted on the dataset of Wang, Dane, and Timmermans (2020), focusing on residents who indicate zero-interest in living in carsharing-facilitating neighbourhoods. The analysis is done in three steps, (i) revealing the ratio of zero-interest individuals to supplement a clearer picture of carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood market prospect, (ii) estimating the influences of observed individual factors on zero-interest to investigate potential imperfections of current carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood schemes and (iii) revealing the unobserved factors indicated by the zero-interest individuals to further discuss the necessities and possibilities of carsharing-facilitating neighbourhood scheme improvements.…”