Residential relocation and changes in household vehicle ownership and travel behavior: Exploring the context of Hubli-Dharwad twin-cities in India from a planning viewpoint

This article simultaneously analyzes residential relocation, vehicle ownership changes, and travel demand changes while accommodating potential self-selection effects to unravel the causal impacts of built environment features on vehicle ownership and travel behavior. Earlier studies on residential mobility have not considered the causal link from objective built environment features to subjective built environment, and rarely control for attitudes and objective built environment features in the empirical analysis. Besides, the literature has not discussed how households perceive neighborhood in terms of children's/women’s travel and how that changes by residential relocation and impact mobility decisions. The paper compares built environment impacts on mobility decisions in two adjacent areas in India, Hubli-Dharwad twin cities, that vary by socio-economic and land use contexts. The study notes that Dharwad residents acquired more personal vehicles than Hubli residents, while the proportion of households who relinquished their vehicles is high in Hubli. Post movement, Dharwad residents opted for areas with higher diversity and density than their counterparts in Hubli. In Hubli, households find that their current location does not help their children use active modes to schools, and women find jobs closer to home. The statistical analysis revealed that Hubli residents prefer locations with improved travel conveniences for women and children. With improvements in the children's travel friendliness, households of both cities decreased vehicle ownership, whereas household vehicle ownership of both cities increased with improvements in women’s travel friendliness. In Dharwad, moving to residential areas characterized by high land-use diversity reduces commute travel, while an inverse association is noted in Hubli. The statistical analysis did not confirm self-selection effects due to travel attitudes. In Dharwad, the latent factor on women’s travel friendliness featured in self-selection and shows an independent effect on vehicle ownership. In Hubli, the factor did not have independent effects on vehicle ownership after accommodating travel attitudes and socio-demographics.