Investigating Household Bicycle Ownership Levels: A Tale of Two Market Segments

This paper is interested in characterizing the attributes of two latent household market segments for bicycle ownership, based on household bicycle ownership count observations from conventional travel and activity surveys. A two-regime or latent class Poisson model is estimated for bicycle ownership levels, using household attributes to explain both the ownership levels and the latent class memberships. The choice between two regimes is modeled using a binary probit model. The results show that the two regimes represent two distinct market segments comprised of (i) households that own bicycles and (ii) those that have selected out of bicycle ownership. The second segment is particularly important since they are unlikely influenced by improved bicycle infrastructure investments (in other words they have decided bikes are not for them without significant gain). The decision on the number of bikes to own, conditional on deciding to own a bicycle, is influenced more by lifecycle characteristics of households relative to the decision to own a bicycle. Interestingly the results show contrast in the impacts of specific variables on both the decision to adopt bicycles, and the latter decision on number of bicycles to own. Some factors that positively affect the likelihood of owning bicycles have opposite effects on the conditional decision of the number of bicycles to own.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB10 Traveler Behavior and Values.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Chen, Roger B
  • Jang, Yunemi
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 25p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bicycles; Households; Market segmented groups; Ownership; Poisson distributions; Probits; Travel surveys
• Subject Areas: Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Vehicles and Equipment; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning; I90: Vehicles;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01515970
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-4861
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 26 2014 10:38AM