Household life cycle and generational differences as factors in personal automobile ownership

This article examines intergenerational changes in personal automobile ownership, made possible with the accumulation of sufficient longitudinal data sets. Economic conditions, cultural characteristics, and technological changes affect how each generation perceives and uses automobiles. Analyzing these factors helps to better understand the inequality of opportunity between car-owning and non-car-owning households of past and current generations. Currently, there are no longitudinal studies of intergenerational differences in household car ownership in the national literature. The authors set out to fill this knowledge gap. Cross-country comparative analysis of motorization rates by age cohorts (generations) showed that differences in motorization rates within cohorts between countries or regions within the same country can be explained by the historical aspect of motorization, the level of economic development, and income differences between generations. Given the dynamically growing motorization in Russia, the research question arises: how the provision of personal cars in Russian Federation households changes over time and across generations. The study aims to identify differences in the level of personal car ownership by age groups and between generations using Russian society as an example. In the course of the study, the authors analyzed data on personal car ownership among Russian households obtained from the Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Health of the Population (RMES) of the National Research University Higher School of Economics and the All-Russian Survey of Households on Consumer Finances, organized by the Ministry of Finance of Russia in 2013-2020 and the Bank of Russia in 2022. Using a retrospective method that brings generations to a single age level, the authors investigated intergenerational differences in car ownership. The authors show the dynamics of changes in the share of households owning a car in different generations and at different stages of the life cycle, as well as depending on the place of residence. The tendency to abandon personal cars among young people is revealed. It was found that this is influenced by the practice of carsharing, as well as the quality and availability of municipal transportation in cities, especially large cities. At the same time, the level of private car ownership in rural areas has significantly increased after 2010 and currently exceeds that in urban areas.