Car Ownership and Post-COVID Urban Mobility across European Cities

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected households’ mobility habits and choices in the past two years. Scarce evidence is available concerning medium term decisions such as the purchase or sale of a private vehicle. This work aims to explore the factors that have influenced households’ decisions to buy or sell a private car due to the pandemic and foresee how these decisions might influence their travel behaviour in the next few years. To achieve this goal, an EU-wide survey gathering information from 21 European cities was carried out during the second term of 2021, when lockdowns were no longer in place, but some mobility and sanitary restrictions were still maintained. The survey focuses on the impact of the pandemic and the consequent mobility restrictions on the transport habits and preferences of the respondents. The questionnaire collected socio-economic characteristics and mobility habits of 10,152 individuals. Interestingly, the analysis of the survey does not provide any evidence of a reduction of motorization rates for teleworkers. On the contrary, both partial and full-time teleworkers have bought significantly more cars than the rest of the groups. These findings greatly contrast with the fact that changes in daily habits resulting from the adoption of teleworking regimes are the main cause of reductions in car use among car buyers. This result suggests that further incentives for car ownership reduction are needed to harness the full potential of teleworking for decreasing car dependency. A positive relation between number of cars owned before COVID and car purchases has been found, pointing out that these purchases are probably not solving accessibility limitations for car-less households. Finally, a positive relation is also observed between car purchases and increased use of shared mobility services.