Institute of Transportation, MOTC

Student：Guo-Shin Fan, 2006.07
Institute of Traffic and Transportation National Chiao Tung University

The number of mobile vehicles in Taiwan has been increasing for many years. There is a great amount of car and motorbike users in Taiwan. Over the past decades there has been extensive investigation of the decision on car ownership and use. In this study, a model for the household decision on car/motorbike ownership and use is developed, estimated, and applied. The model takes car/motorbike both into account and is explicitly based on the microeconomic theory of consumer behavior. The probabilities of car/motorbike ownership are the derived and calculated by comparing direct and indirect utilities. The developed model in this research is based on the framework of discrete/continuous econometrics, in which the vehicle ownership choice decision, the vehicle use are submodels.

A disaggregate data set at the level of individual households was obtained based on the household interviews conducted in Taipei city and Taipei county in 2001.The estimation results show that only the other vehicle using mileage elasticity of mileage is greater than 1.Authorities can improve public transportation environment to reduce private vehicle use. Key words: vehicle ownership and use, utility theory, joint choice model.