Securing or sacrificing access to a car: Gender difference in the effects of life events

This paper focuses on gender differentiated effects of life events on the decision to change car accessibility. It argues that similar to other choices (e.g. employment) women and men may vary in decisions to the choice of car accessibility, particularly in response to life events. This study aims at exploring this hypothesis. These varying choices may lead to difference in travel demand and thereby may require targeted policy formulation. However, transportation literature has rarely addressed this issue. To address this gap, the paper utilises the data collected through a retrospective questionnaire survey designed for the region of Utrecht in The Netherlands, which provide a unique opportunity to analyse year-to-year change in travel choices. The decision to change car accessibility is assessed in two ways – first, a shift from limited-access to full-access and second, a shift from full-access to limited-access. Depending on the direction of changes, two separate analyses are performed. Within each analysis, two additional mixed logit estimations are run based on the sub-samples of male and female. Comparing the results of these sub-samples, it is found that life events such as birth of the first child, divorce, residential relocation and employer change have significant effect on the decision to get full-access to a car only for the female respondents. No significant effect from life event is observed for the decision to sacrifice full-access of a car for both men and women.