Does Ridehailing Use Affect Vehicle Ownership or Vice Versa? An Exploratory Investigation of the Relationship Using a Latent Market Segmentation Approach

This paper presents an examination of the interrelationship between household vehicle ownership and ridehailing use frequency. Both variables constitute important mobility choices with significant implications for the future of transport. Although it is generally known that these two behavioral phenomena are inversely related to one another, the direction of causality is rather ambiguous. Do vehicle ownership levels affect ridehailing use frequency, or does the adoption and use of ridehailing services affect vehicle ownership? If ridehailing services affect vehicle ownership, then it is plausible that a future of mobility-as-a-service would be characterized by lower levels of vehicle ownership. To explore the degree to which these causal relationships are prevalent in the population, a joint latent segmentation model system was formulated and estimated on a survey data set collected in four automobile-oriented metropolitan areas of the United States. The latent segmentation model system recognized that the causal structures driving the mobility choices of individuals were not directly observable. Model estimation results showed that 58% of the survey sample followed the causal structure in which ridehailing use frequency affected vehicle ownership. This finding suggests that there is considerable structural heterogeneity in the population with respect to causal structures and that ridehailing use does indeed hold considerable promise to effect changes in private vehicle ownership in the future.