Strategies for personal mobility: A study of consumer acceptance of subscription drive-it-yourself car services

Abstract

This thesis investigates consumer acceptance of subscription drive-it-yourself car services [SDCSs], which are an evolution of car hire that began entering the commercial marketplace in the mid- 1990s. The aim of this research is to develop techniques to forecast how consumer demand for SDCSs may develop. On the basis of research reported in this thesis, it is argued that a person’s [strategic] decision to subscribe to an SDCS can be reasonably considered to have a dependency with their expectation of [tactically] using it to access particular out-of-home personal activities. It is shown that people can also be thought to view subscribing to an SDCS as part of a larger ‘portfolio’ choice of travel options. Traditional analyses of people’s travel choices are insensitive to these two issues. Two datasets, one revealed-choice and the other stated-choice, were designed in order to provide empirical data to test the proposed ‘strategic/tactical’ and ‘portfolio’ analytical form. The revealed-choice dataset made use of web-based data-mining techniques, whilst the stated-choice survey is novel in several respects to address the challenges presented by the SDCS context. The methodological innovations proposed in this research proved successful in forecasting consumer demand for SDCSs in the empirical application, and appear promising for wider use within the transport domain and related research fields.