Influences of car sharing and car license plate lottery policy on consumer preference and accessibility in urban mobility system: A stated choice experiment in Beijing

Sustainable mobility is critical to achieve sustainable development goals. Public policy makers worldwide have introduced different policy instruments to motivate sustainable mobility such as promoting car sharing and introducing car license plate lottery. Limited attention has been devoted to studying the effects of these types of policies on consumers' accessibility in urban mobility system, in particular when these policies are intended to achieve the same objective of promoting sustainable mobility. To fill this gap, based on the consumer discrete choice behavioral theory, this paper designs a stated choice experiment and performs discrete choice analysis to investigate how the interactions of these two policies influence consumers’ mobility preferences and consumer surplus-based accessibility. By collecting data in Beijing, as an empirical context, we identify a nested logit model with a hierarchical choice structure, where bus and underground fall in the nest of public transit, while car sharing, private car and taxi are independent alternatives. Consumers who are participating in the car license plate lottery are more likely to choose car sharing, and car sharing can largely compensate for the loss of accessibility caused by the car license plate lottery policy, which implies that car sharing and the car license plate lottery policy are indeed complementary policies. However, the introduction of car sharing can also lead to an unintended consequence of higher total car usage by attracting more public transit users who never intended to buy or drive cars. This study contributes to the literature by proposing and implementing a generic theoretical framework for analyzing consumer preference-based accessibility for developing a sustainable mobility system and provides important practical implications.