Preferences for carsharing-facilitated neighbourhoods: a latent-class model

Carsharing is a popular new transportation service that provides people with short-term access to vehicles without the higher cost and responsibilities of owning one's own car. Carsharing-facilitated neighbourhoods provide their residents with a subscription to a carsharing organisation to compensate for less public parking facilities in an attempt to contribute to more sustainable urban development. Neighbourhood residential carsharing can help reduce private car use and parking infrastructures to provide residents with a better living environment and increase their quality of life by planning more green facilities, larger residential buildings, better air quality, safer children play areas, etc. In this study, we investigate the preferences of residents who
currently live in urban areas in The Netherlands for carsharing-facilitated neighbourhoods. For that purpose, a stated choice experiment is designed that considers the attributes of carsharing-facilitated neighbourhoods
and elicits respondents’ preferences for these neighbourhoods. In total, 623 valid responses were gathered for the analysis. In order to segment respondents, we applied a latent class analysis, which indicated that a twoclass solution gave the optimal results with a Rho-squared of 0.327. Based on these results, one class is less willing to live in a carsharing-facilitated neighbourhood; the other class is more interested in living in a
carsharing-facilitated neighbourhood. These results are useful to identify the right socio-demographic groups and the preferred carsharing residential environments to develop implementation strategies for carsharingfacilitated neighbourhoods.