Valuing private car ownership and use in the U.S.
Tuesday, November 10, 2020 at 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Virtual EventOur societal dependence on car ownership and use contributes to the unsustainability of the transport sector with far-reaching consequences, including traffic congestion, road deaths, urban air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. For households, car ownership is expensive and our cars are sitting idle more than 90% of the time. Yet, the vast majority of people in the U.S. still choose to own cars. Why don’t we choose to share vehicles—as many advocates of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) promote—in order to avoid the upfront cost of purchasing a vehicle, pay only for what we use, and free up space in our cities? The dominant explanation has been that we systematically underestimate the true cost of car ownership, which implies that more of us would choose to forego car ownership if this mental accounting were corrected. This research suggests an alternative explanation: that people value their cars more than they cost.
In this talk, Joanna Moody, Research Program Manager at the Mobility Systems Center, an MIT Energy Initiative Low-Carbon Energy Center, will present results from a survey deployed in four U.S. cities—Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Seattle, WA; and Washington, D.C.—in which Moody and fellow researchers asked respondents how much compensation they would need to receive to lose access to their car for one year. From these results, Moody estimates the value of owning a car (including convenience, flexibility, control, and status that comes from having one’s own car) separate from the utility of using a car. She then compares these valuations to the costs of car ownership in the U.S.
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School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P), School of Engineering (SoE), School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), Sloan School of Management (Sloan), School of Science, Schwarzman College of Computing
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