The Socioeconomic Characteristics, Urban Built Environment and Household Car Ownership in a Rapidly Growing City: Evidence from Zhongshan, China

Abstract

Growth in car ownership has significant impacts on the use of urban space and management of urban environments, especially in rapidly developing countries such as China. However, among voluminous literature, few studies have investigated the correlates of household car ownership in the Chinese context, leading to the lack of effective measures to tackle rapid motorization. This study explored the impacts of household-level socioeconomic characteristics and neighborhood-level built environment on household car ownership, with data collected from 25,325 households in Zhongshan, China. The Zero-inflated Poission regression models detect that, all else being equal, living in a neighborhood with a compact and mixed urban form, better bus service and adjacency to CBD is associated with fewer household cars and higher probability to own zero cars. The models also suggest that household size and income, number of employed or students, and availability of competitive vehicles are significantly related to the number of cars in a household. The findings facilitate our understanding of the effects of socioeconomic characteristics and built environment on household car ownership and provide insights into an effective design of measures to slow down the rapid motorization in China.

How urban densification shapes walking behaviours in older community dwellers: a cross-sectional analysis of potential pathways of influence

“…As confirmed in this study, high density neighbourhoods offer access to a large number of food and retail outlets [46], which are the primary motivators of utilitarian walking trips within the neighbourhood [5]. This study also supports the hypothesis that, via the provision of food/retail destinations and an interconnected street network, densification reduces car dependency [47] resulting in more active utilitarian trips and higher amounts of transportation walking in the local community [48].…”

“…1) [46]. Higher residential, public transport and destination densities were expected to result in less green space (park area) [44] and household car ownership to be more prevalent among respondents living in areas with lower residential, street intersection, food/retail, recreation and public transport densities [47]. Frequency of within-neighbourhood transportation walking was expected to be negatively related to household car ownership [48] and positively associated with street intersection and destination densities [5].…”

Urban environments and objectively-assessed physical activity and sedentary time in older Belgian and Chinese community dwellers: potential pathways of influence and the moderating role of physical function

“…Unpublished data from a previous study conducted in Hong Kong suggested that these relationships might be curvilinear (inverted-U or concave down, increasing). Household car ownership was expected to be more prevalent among respondents living in areas with lower residential, commercial/civic destination, recreation and public transport densities [53]. We hypothesised that MVPA would be unrelated to residential density [9,12] and positively associated with commercial and civic destinations, recreation facilities, public transport stops and number of parks [9].…”

Development of Multivariate Ordered Probit Model to Understand Household Vehicle Ownership Behavior in Xiaoshan District of Hangzhou, China

“…Based on the existing literature, the research of vehicle ownership and vehicle type is not sufficient in China. Firstly, most studies in China mainly analyze the vehicle ownership of a single type [36][37][38], rather than discussing the correlation and transition of vehicle ownership between different types. Secondly, the ownership of electric bicycle is seldom considered in model framework [39,40].…”