Analyzing car ownership in Quebec City: a comparison of traditional and latent class ordered and unordered models

作者：Anowar Sabreena; Yasmin Shamsunnahar; Eluru Naveen^*; Miranda Moreno Luis F

来源：Transportation, 2014, 41(5): 1013-1039.

DOI：10.1007/s11116-014-9522-9

• Car ownership in the Canadian context
• Latent class models
• Latent ordered logit
• Latent multinomial logit

Private car ownership plays a vital role in the daily travel decisions of individuals and households. The topic is of great interest to policy makers given the growing focus on global climate change, public health, and sustainable development issues. Not surprisingly, it is one of the most researched transportation topics. The extant literature on car ownership models considers the influence of exogenous variables to remain the same across the entire population. However, it is possible that the influence of exogenous variable effects might vary across the population. To accommodate this potential population heterogeneity in the context of car ownership, the current paper proposes the application of latent class versions of ordered (ordered logit) and unordered response (multinomial logit) models. The models are estimated using the data from Quebec City, Canada. The latent class models offer superior data fit compared to their traditional counterparts while clearly highlighting the presence of segmentation in the population. The validation exercise using the model estimation results further illustrates the strength of these models for examining car ownership decisions. Moreover, the latent class unordered response models perform slightly better than the latent class ordered response models for the metropolitan region examined.

• 出版日期2014-9
• 单位McGill