This paper focuses on the impact of life course events on car ownership and, ultimately, on travel behavior, to deliver a basis for an influence towards a more sustainable mobility. The theoretical background for the analysis is the mobility biographies approach assuming that travel behavior is mainly habitual. Therefore, only relatively seldom "windows of opportunity" open for behavioral changes when travel decisions are considered more intensively. Car ownership is used in the analysis as a proxy for actual travel behavior. Hence, the results may deliver some insights on the effect of key events in a person's or household's life on travel behavior and, furthermore, the potential of soft policy intervention measures to change daily mobility. The German Socio Economic Panel is used for the empirical analysis. The results show the importance of life course events for travel behavior. Beside the household status variables age, number of cars per household and weighted monthly income, a main impact on the car ownership growth have the four key events of changing number of adults in a household, birth of a first child, changing weighted monthly income and, a residential moving from a regional core to a regional core area. Expected influences from relocations with a spatial structural change can't be proved so far.
Abstract