Audit Of Car Ownership Models

In this report, a review was presented of existing models for car ownership. This review contains a description and comparison of existing Dutch car ownership models and a review and comparison of recently developed models in the international literature and models used in practice. The provision of this review was one of the objectives of this project. The other objective was to recommend on directions for potential development for improving the AVV car ownership models. The car ownership model that AVV uses for most applications is the so-called FACTS model (Forecasting Air pollution through Car Traffic Simulation). FACTS also provides the future total number of cars that is used as an external total in the Dutch national Model System (LMS) for traffic and transport. The background of this audit is the desire of AVV to obtain information on the basis of which a well-founded decision can be made on the development of an improved car ownership model, that can produce robust and sensible car ownership forecasts for all kinds of variants of variabilisation of the road tax (MRB) and car purchase tax (BPM). As part of this project, a number of policy advisers was interviewed about what types of outputs are required from a car ownership model, what should be the forecasting horizon and what should be the policy variables to be simulated.