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International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (1.1) (2018) 472-476 International Journal of Engineering & Technology Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET Research paper Effect of socioeconomic and latent variables in vehicle ownership: A case study of Agartala city, India Amitabha Acharjee 1* , Partha Pratim Sarkar 2 , Joyanta Pal 3 1 Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Agartala, Tripura, India 2 Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Agartala, Tripura, India 3 Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Agartala, Tripura, India *Corresponding author E-mail:amitabhaacharjee1990@gmail.com Abstract On the whole, car ownership is regarded as an imperative variable in travel behavior research. Car and motorcycle ownership are increasing rapidly in developing countries leading to an unsustainable developments. Using a data of 584 respondents from the Agartala city randomly collected, a model has been prepared to understand vehicle ownership for both car and motorized two wheeler mode (MTW). Latent variables along with socioeconomic variables such as monthly income, gender, age were used for modeling vehicle ownership using structural equation modelling. Latent variables used in this study, flexibility (Motorized Two wheeler), Negative public transportation perception and comfort (car) were found to be significant in the model. Our result suggests apart from socioeconomic variables, latent variables also explains vehicle ownership model. Keywords: Car ownership, attitude and perception, structural equation modeling. 1. Introduction The majority of cities, transportation developers have been spending hard to cope increasing private vehicle (particularly car and two-wheeler) travel requirement. In recent times, there is a greater than before dependency on the car and motorized two wheeler (MTW) can lead to issues such as pollution, congestion, accidents etc. Limiting car ownership and motorized two wheeler and their use will be a difficult task for the majority of the developing economies. In India, the average level of proprietorship of cars, presently 13 per 1,000 populations, and is anticipated to develop exponentially [1]. From the perspective of sustainable transportation design, consideration of the future car and MTW proprietorship and activities of individuals spending private vehicles will be of greater importance in case of developing countries. In recent years, India has undergone fast urbanization on a large measure. The speedy development of vehicle purchase rates has elevated concerns regarding social, economic and ecological sustainability [1]. Growth of vehicle proprietorship represents the aspiration of India’s middle-class to lead more relaxed life and engage in more economic and discretionary activities. Relatively low per-capita income in the country also makes car ownership a symbol of luxury and status. Car ownership is principally used as an exogenous variable, besides spatial and socioeconomic variable to describe travel behavior [2-3]. Some studies also have considered car ownership as exogenous variable and describe it in accordance with numerous spatial and socioeconomic variables [4-5]. In the majority of the smaller Indian cities, with population not more than five hundred thousand, there have been noteworthy transformations in the trip making activities of the individuals. Factors such as growing geographical area, changing socioeconomic and land use patterns, increasing number of motorized personal vehicles, absence of planned public transportation system might be influencing the change in travel behavior observed in these cities. In accordance with a survey of Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD), Govt. of India (2008), in the majority of the small sized Indian cities there will be a considerable upsurge in the modal shares of private transport modes for instance cars and motorized two wheeler (MTW) (57% in 2007 to 72% in 2031). Moreover, the part of the public transport modes (5% in 2007) and non-motorized modes (NMT) (38% in 2007) is decreasing in many of these cities. According to this report, the percentage mode share of public transport for small cities was very low and also predicted it to be much lower in the future (2% in 2031). At this juncture it becomes important to understand the factors related to car ownership and car use. Organization of the remainder of this paper is given as follows. The subsequent section reviews the relevant literature. Section 3 details the data collection and study area description. Section 4 gives complete details of the methodology, and section 5 provides the relevant results. Section 6 concludes the paper by summarizing the major findings and discussing the policy implications. 2. Literature review There are substantial amount of investigations and studies related to vehicle ownership [6, 7, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. Golob [6] have studied the relationship between the competing influence on mobility on income and car ownership and also analyzed the effect of other mode of transport after controlling for the causal influence of both income and car ownership. He concluded that number of car and car trip were both increasing function of income. The middle income class shows a strong negative effect on public transport trip, the lower income class has a strong positive effect. Srinivasan et al. [7] found that the vehicle ownership to be significantly influencing the sensitivity of the decision maker towards travel time. They have modeled this effect by segmenting the decision makers based on the vehicle ownership and the