Generational Differences in Automobility: Comparing America's Millennials and Gen Xers Using Gradient Boosting Decision Trees

Kailai Wang and Xize Wang
Additional contact information
Kailai Wang: University of Houston
Xize Wang: National University of Singapore

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Whether the Millennials are less auto-centric than the previous generations has been widely discussed in the literature. Most existing studies use regression models and assume that all factors are linear-additive in contributing to the young adults' driving behaviors. This study relaxes this assumption by applying a non-parametric statistical learning method, namely the gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT). Using U.S. nationwide travel surveys for 2001 and 2017, this study examines the non-linear dose-response effects of lifecycle, socio-demographic and residential factors on daily driving distances of Millennial and Gen-X young adults. Holding all other factors constant, Millennial young adults had shorter predicted daily driving distances than their Gen-X counterparts. Besides, residential and economic factors explain around 50% of young adults' daily driving distances, while the collective contributions for life course events and demographics are about 33%. This study also identifies the density ranges for formulating effective land use policies aiming at reducing automobile travel demand.

Date: 2022-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-sea and nep-tre
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Cities, 114, 103204 (2021)

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.11056 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2206.11056

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().