Skip to main content
Climate
Search

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
    • For Educators
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search
MIT

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
    • For Educators
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search
PostOctober 26, 2020

Valuing private car ownership and use in the U.S. with Joanna Moody

Tuesday, November 10, 2020
3:30-4:30 pm ET
Register

Our societal dependence on car ownership and use contributes to the unsustainability of the transport sector with far-reaching consequences, including traffic congestion, road deaths, urban air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. For households, car ownership is expensive and our cars are sitting idle more than 90% of the time. Yet, the vast majority of people in the U.S. still choose to own cars. Why don’t we choose to share vehicles—as many advocates of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) promote—in order to avoid the upfront cost of purchasing a vehicle, pay only for what we use, and free up space in our cities? The dominant explanation has been that we systematically underestimate the true cost of car ownership, which implies that more of us would choose to forego car ownership if this mental accounting were corrected. This research suggests an alternative explanation: that people value their cars more than they cost.

In this talk, Joanna Moody, Research Program Manager at the Mobility Systems Center, an MIT Energy Initiative Low-Carbon Energy Center, will present results from a survey deployed in four U.S. cities—Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Seattle, WA; and Washington, D.C.—in which Moody and fellow researchers asked respondents how much compensation they would need to receive to lose access to their car for one year. From these results, Moody estimates the value of owning a car (including convenience, flexibility, control, and status that comes from having one’s own car) separate from the utility of using a car. She then compares these valuations to the costs of car ownership in the U.S.

About the speaker

Joanna Moody is the research program manager for the Mobility Systems Center, an MIT Energy Initiative Low-Carbon Energy Center. As a co-PI on one of the Center’s first projects, she is exploring how Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) might compete with current habits of private car ownership and use in the U.S. More generally, Moody's research focuses on how individual decisions by policy makers and consumers will shape the use of new transportation technologies and services that challenge the existing paradigm of reliance on gasoline-powered, single-occupancy, privately-owned vehicles, and how these impacts vary across international urban contexts. Moody received her PhD in transportation from MIT in 2019 for her work on “car pride” and its impacts on car ownership and use.

by MIT Energy Initiative
Topics
Energy
Finance & Economics
Cars

Related Posts

PodcastJuly 16, 2025

How energy systems are shaped

MIT Energy Initiative
PodcastJuly 10, 2025

E8: Transmission: power to the people

TILclimate Podcast
TILclimate logo
PostJuly 2, 2025

3 Questions: How MIT’s venture studio is partnering with MIT labs to solv...

MIT News
David Cohen-Tanugi has been the venture builder for Proto Ventures’ fusion and clean energy channel since 2023.
PostJuly 2, 2025

Confronting the AI/energy conundrum

MIT Energy Initiative
At the 2025 MIT Energy Initiative Spring Symposium, Evelyn Wang (at lectern), the MIT vice president for energy and climate, joined MITEI Director William H. Green to discuss how collaborations across campus can help solve the data center challenge.

MIT Climate News in Your Inbox

 
 

MIT Groups Log In

Log In

Footer

  • About
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Accessibility
  • Contact
MIT Climate Project
MIT
Communicator Award Winner
Communicator Award Winner