Long-term changes in Japanese young people’s car ownership and usage from an expenditure perspective

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Highlights

  • Car ownership of Japanese young people has declined since 1999.

  • Temporal trends of car expenditure shares varied across income groups.

  • Car and other expenditures are jointly modeled with inter-choice interactions.

  • The influence of car-related utility was moderate and fluctuated over time.

  • Influences of low-income status and the number of household members are confirmed.

Introduction

In recent years, studies of young people in the field of transportation have increased, inspired largely by observations of reduced dependence on cars by young people in some developed countries (Bussière et al., 2019, Klein and Smart, 2017, Hjorthol, 2016). This phenomenon has various policy implications. First, reduced car ownership and car use implies that traffic congestion and accidents may be mitigated without further massive infrastructure investments. Similarly, reduction of car-related energy and resource consumption and the resulting environmental emissions may be expected. Second, if reduced use of cars results in increased use of active travel modes like cycling and walking, then people’s health conditions related to travel may be improved. Third, if reduced car use leads to lack of active participation in activities involving monetary consumption, then the role of transportation in economic development (including its contribution to the automobile industry) may be worsened. Fourth, if reduced car ownership and car use is due to economic reasons and, as a consequence, young people are more likely to become homebound, then the role of transportation in encouraging social development may be decreased. There are probably more merits and demerits of young people’s reduced dependence on cars.

Such a decline in car dependence has been found to be affected by urbanization, growing preference for other travel modes, the diminishing popularity of cars among young people, and concerns about climate change (Hopkins, 2016, Hopkins and Stephenson, 2016, Kuhnimhof et al., 2012, Simons et al., 2017). However, most existing studies only focus on young people’s travel behavior, even though travel behavior is just a part of life. Some researchers, such as Garikapati et al., 2016, Oakil et al., 2016, confirmed the influences of increased singlehood and childlessness, and delayed life stages on car ownership and usage. Our knowledge about young people’s travel behavior from a life-oriented perspective remains limited. In recent years, the ever-increasing importance of the life-oriented approach (Zhang, 2014, Zhang, 2017) in travel behavior research has been gradually recognized by the transportation research community (Zhang, 2015, Zhang et al., 2016a, Zhang et al., 2016b, Zhang and Van Acker, 2017, Goulias et al., 2019). The life-oriented approach argues that travel behavior and other life choices are interdependent. Such interdependencies have been empirically confirmed in many studies (e.g., Zhang, 2017, Zhang and Van Acker, 2017, Fatmi and Habib, 2018a, Fatmi and Habib, 2018b, Scheiner, 2018).

Owning and using a car is costly, considering that cars are durable goods. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that households’ decisions about car ownership and usage may be related to their decisions about other monetary consumption, because the household budget is usually a limited resource. Household expenditure surveys are common in developed countries; such surveys include the Consumer Expenditure Survey in the USA (Thakuriah and Liao, 2005, Ferdous et al., 2010, Thakuriah and Mallon-Keita, 2014), the Survey of Household Spending in Canada (Anowar et al., 2018), Family Budget Surveys in France (Nicolas and Pelé, 2017), the Household Consumption Survey in Italy (Frontuto, 2019), and the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure in Japan (Lise et al., 2014). Developing countries have similar surveys, such as the Income and Expenditure Survey in South Africa (Venter, 2011). Nevertheless, a literature review (see Section 2) indicates that (1) young people’s car ownership and usage have not been examined from such a life-oriented perspective (i.e., expenditure decisions in this study), (2) no study has been done to simultaneously accommodate behavioral interactions of expenditure decisions across various life domains and the existence of zero consumption in the context of young people, (3) studies based on data over a longer period are very limited, and (4) there are no relevant studies in the context of Asian developed countries.

To fill the above research gaps, this study makes an initial attempt to simultaneously analyze all types of household expenditures within a unified modeling framework based on the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure of Japan over a 25-year period from 1984 to 2009. During this period, the survey was conducted every five years, i.e., 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, and 2009. To represent interactions between various expenditures under the constraint of a limited household budget, a household expenditure allocation model is built based on the concept of multilinear utility under the principle of random utility maximization, where zero consumption is further incorporated endogenously.

Use of household expenditure data not only provides an additional set of factors to explain young people’s car ownership and usage but also suggests a re-orientation of travel behavior research by associating it with general research on life choices. The significance of this study is in its contribution to a better understanding of young people’s car ownership and usage by incorporating inter-expenditure interactions based on multilinear utility and on a large-scale national survey covering a 25-year period, with a peak of young people’s car-related expenditure.

The remainder of this paper is as follows. First, a brief literature review is presented, and then data used in this study are described. Next, the expenditure allocation model is introduced, followed by analyses of modeling estimation results and relevant discussion. The last section concludes and also summarizes future research issues.

Section snippets

Literature review

Here, a literature review about research on car ownership and usage is given, focusing mainly on the following four aspects: (1) studies from a life-oriented perspective in general, (2) studies in association with expenditure, (3) research in the context of Asia, and (4) modeling approaches. Clarifying these aspects is useful to differentiate the current study well from existing studies.

Data: National survey of family income and expenditure of Japan

In this study, data were collected from the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure in Japan, which has been implemented regularly by the Bureau of Statistics, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication since 1950.1 For this study, data for the years 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 were obtained via official approval by the above Ministry. Originally, as shown in Table 1, many detailed categories

Household expenditure allocation model based on multilinear utility

Considering its limited budget, a household must make various trade-offs between different expenditures. Here, it is assumed that household n maximizes its utility Un when allocating its limited budget En to different life domains (end: expenditure for life domain d). Un is a multilinear utility (Zhang et al., 2002, Zhang et al., 2005), where the first part on the right-hand side is called additive utility, and the second part is called interactive utility. Here, the interactive utility is

Explanatory variables

As listed in Table 2, two types of explanatory variables are employed in this study: common variables (9 variables) and domain-specific variables (20 variables). Considering their relevance to this study, these variables are selected from all question items of the aforementioned national survey. And, as the survey contents were changed over time and not all variables are always available in the data of the six survey years, explanatory variables are not the same across the six models. As for

Conclusions

This study re-visits the research on young people’s car ownership and usage, in the context of Japan, based on a national expenditure survey covering a 25-year period from 1984 to 2009 (including the period of bubble economy, roughly between 1985 and 1990). The survey regularly collects various household expenditures, including car-related expenditure. Car ownership and usage have been analyzed by explicitly reflecting various trade-offs between car-related and other expenditures, based on a

Acknowledgement

This study was fully supported by a Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) (Principal researcher: Junyi Zhang, Hiroshima University; No. 15H02271) and a Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (Principal researcher: Junyi Zhang, Hiroshima University; No. 18KT0007), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)

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