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As the world recognizes that its growing reliance on private, fossil fuel-based vehicles is unsustainable, understanding how to avoid growth in car ownership and how to shift current users towards more efficient, environmentally-friendly, safe, and inclusive alternatives is a critical vision for meeting sustainable (transportation) development goals. Policy makers looking to shift consumer behavior away from cars need a more rigorous understanding of how different attitudes play a role in influencing car ownership and use and how this might vary by people and place. In this dissertation we provide deep insight into one of the many symbolic and affective motives behind car consumption:“car pride” or the attribution of social status and personal image to owning and using a car.

Using data collected from individuals in two US cities and in 51 countries around the world, we develop and demonstrate the reliability, validity, and invariance of polytomous (12, 7-point Likert-format statements) and dichotomous (9, dichotomous statements) survey measures for car pride using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). With these measures, we explore variations in car pride across individuals, cities, and countries using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Across individuals, we find that those who are younger, male, and have higher incomes generally have higher car pride. Controlling for individual characteristics, we find that car pride is influenced by context. Between US cities, we find that Houston has higher car pride than New York City. Across countries, we find that less developed countries exhibit higher car pride. We also disentangle the bidirectional causal …