On the relationship between private transportation expenditure and socio-demographic variables

A precise understanding of the relationships between household characteristics and transportation expenditures is of paramount importance to support bottom-up policies. Despite the considerable amount of research activities carried out in the last decades, an agreement regarding the determinants of the transportation expenditure is far from being achieved. This paper contributes to the existing discussion, focusing on the Italian case study, by analysing the relationships between the private transportation expenditure and the socio-demographic variables. In particular, the impact that the different household characteristics have on the private transportation expenditures have been examined. The analysis is performed by coupling three statistical methods: the ordinary least squares method, the variance inflation factor, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator. It is found that the geographic area (in terms of the macro-scale and the micro-scale geographic locations) as well as income-related variables are likely to be determinants for the private transportation expenditure.