Changing Influence of Factors Explaining Household Car Ownership Levels in the Netherlands

To contribute to existing research on the influence of various factors on household car ownership in the Netherlands, this study addressed the question whether and to what extent the influence of economic, sociodemographic, and spatial factors on the number of cars owned by households has changed over time. There seems to be an absence of studies investigating the changing influence of these factors on car ownership in recent decades, and in the Netherlands. The study used the statistical method of ordered logistic regression on household mobility data on 162,593 households, collected by the National Traffic Survey of the Netherlands in 1987, 1991, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2010, and 2014. The results show that the influence of household income, size, composition, gender, age, education, working status, and suburbanization levels on car ownership changed substantially between 1987 and 2014. The strong influence of household income on household car ownership diminished quite remarkably between 1987 and 2014, whereas the influence of household size grew significantly during the period. The results could serve as a first step toward a predictive model that endogenously estimates household car ownership levels in the Netherlands.