Modeling Mobility Tool Ownership of Youth in Toronto,Ontario,Canada

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of the modeling of mobility tool ownership of the youth population in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area (GTHA) in Ontario, Canada. Research on mobility tool ownership is limited. The key contribution of the research is to enhance the understanding of how neighborhood characteristics and accessibility affect mobility tool ownership among GTHA youth. The study exclusively considered youth between the ages of 17 and 19 years; at this age the subjects passed through a transitional stage in the GTHA because of opportunities for ownership of types of mobility tools. This study used data from the 2006 Transportation Tomorrow Survey, a household-based travel survey of the GTHA. The study used a latent class choice modeling approach to account for unobserved heterogeneity, which was often ignored in traditional choice modeling. The results suggest that the latent class logit model outperforms the conventional multinomial logit model according to model fit and its ability to evaluate various parameters across latent classes. Several sociodemographic characteristics, trip attributes, accessibility measures, and neighborhood characteristics were found to explain different types of mobility tool ownership of the youth population. Finally, the results revealed that latent heterogeneity existed in the sampled population. The research offers important behavioral insights into the formation of travel habits of youth that could be useful in shaping the travel behavior of Toronto's young adults.