Exploration of Short-Term Vehicle Utilization Choices in Households with Multiple Vehicle Types

With the growing concerns of energy sustainability, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change, there is an increasing interest in understanding vehicle ownership and utilization decisions better so that effective policies can be implemented to reduce the negative impacts of private automobile usage. Although there is a rich body of literature on the long-term decisions of vehicle ownership and the composition of vehicles, the short-term choices of which vehicle to use from the household’s vehicle holdings and what distance will be traveled to access opportunities, as well as the interrelationship between the two, are less understood. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the literature on short-term vehicle utilization decisions with the use of data collected in 2009 from the National Household Travel Survey. A latent class segmentation model was estimated with alternate interrelationship structures as the latent classes. Within each latent class, the choices were modeled consistently with the...