Trends in Personal Motor Vehicle Ownership and Use: Evidence From the Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey

Abstract

This paper addresses three related subject areas. The first is the total volume of personal motor vehicle travel, its recent growth, and the sources of its growth. The second subject concerns vehicle ownership, specifically, the number, types, and age distribution of motor vehicles available to households. The third subject is household vehicle utilization patterns; this section also includes a model of the determinants of household demand for private motor vehicle travel. The paper also explores the implications of changes in vehicle ownership and use for air pollutant emissions and energy consumption. Like its predecessors, the 1995 NPTS permits a variety of useful analyses that together reveal important insights into the patterns of household motor vehicle ownership and use, as well as into the underlying behavior that produces them. The results presented here should be useful to transportation professionals seeking to understand the patterns and determinants of motor vehicle travel, as well as to planners and policy-makers in their efforts to design and implement strategies that reduce the environmental consequences of growing motor vehicle usage.

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