The raising cost of the energy, the heavy congestion on metropolitan motorways and the pollution in urban areas caused by the use of private cars, enormously influence our economies and our lifestyles. Increasing awareness about these problems is expected to affect mobility habits and to create opportunities for changes in the automotive industry in the near future.

In this lecture, two innovative methodological approaches to study car ownership will be proposed.  An integrated modeling framework for vehicle ownership and use that accounts for several choice dimensions and that is based on a number of policy variables will be presented. The problem that is solved includes a mixture of discrete and continuous variables; therefore, the resulting modeling structure requires the simultaneous analysis of different variables that are not from the same family. The modeling framework proposed is applied to predict behavioral changes in response to the evolution of the society (income), built environment (density), transportation policies (fuel cost) and public transportation infrastructures (metro and bus).

The second part of the talk presents estimation technique for the analysis of the impact of technological changes on the dynamic of demand for new cars. The proposed research presents a dynamic formulation that explicitly models market evolution and that accounts for consumers’ expectations of future product characteristics. The method overcomes the main limitation of discrete choice methods that mainly model choices in a static context.

The first part is based on: An Integrated Model for Discrete and Continuous Decisions with Application to Vehicle Ownership, Type and usage Choices. Joint withYangwen Liu and Jean-Michel Tremblay

The second part is based on: A Dynamic Formulation for Car Ownership Modeling. Joint with Renting Xu and Fabian Bastin