Description:

NUTC Academic Semiinar Series presents:

Exploring Millennials' Adoption of Shared Mobility & Attitudes Towards Vehicle Ownership in California

Abstract: This study investigates millennials’ mobility choices through the analysis of a dataset collected in California among 2155 young adults and members of the preceding Generation X, as the first stage of a panel study of millennials’ residential choices, lifestyles, travel behavior and adoption of technology. We find that, compared to Gen Xers, millennials own fewer cars, drive less and more often use alternative travel modes. Independent millennials, who have already established their households, are found to live in more accessible residential locations, which are conducive to the adoption of travel multimodality and the use of non-auto modes. Dependent millennials, who still live with their parents, also adopt multimodal travel, even if they often live in less accessible locations. Millennials are heavy adopters of shared mobility services: however, and somewhat concerning from an environmental and health-related perspective, we find that a non-trivial amount of Uber/Lyft trips substitute for trips that would otherwise be made by walking or cycling. Finally, the zero- or low-vehicle ownership status of many independent millennials might be short-lived: millennials show higher propensity to purchase vehicles as they age, especially if they plan to have a child in the near future.

- Giovanni Circella, UC Davis; Georgia Tech

Giovanni Circella is a Senior Research Engineer at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who currently shares his time with the University of California, Davis, where he is a researcher at the Institute of Transportation Studies and the National Center for Sustainable Transportation.

His research interests include travel behavior, transportation planning, travel demand modeling, land use modeling, travel survey methods, transportation sustainability, shared mobility, energy consumption, and policy analysis. He is an expert in the collection and analysis of behavioral data and the estimation of discrete choice models and other quantitative methodologies.

Dr. Circella has been the principal investigator for several research projects. His recent research has focused on the impact of individual attitudes on travel, land use and transportation, the impact of shared mobility and on-demand ride services (e.g. Uber/Lyft) on travel and auto ownership, the impact of ICT, and the mobility of specific population segments (e.g. “millennials”) and in various geographic regions (United States, EU countries, South America and emerging economies from the Middle East/Gulf Area). He speak English, Spanish and Italian fluently.

He is a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committees on
ADB20: ICT and Transportation, Member and Research Coordinator
ADD40: Transportation and Sustainability, Member and Communication Coordinator
ABE50: Transportation Demand Management, Member
ADA10: Statewide Multimodal Transportation Planning, Member

He serves in the panel for the NCHRP projects 20-102, 20-102(01) and 20-102(09) on the Impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles, and he is a member of the Research Faculty Senate of the Georgia Institute of Technology.