Urban Transportation

Evaluating the impacts of autonomous vehicles on transportation and cities

The transportation field is going through a period of major change due to the introduction of new technologies and services such as mobility sharing, ride hailing, Mobility as a Service, and autonomous vehicles (AVs). As such, there is a great deal of uncertainty about what forms of service will be accepted and what impacts they will have on transportation and cities. Services that operate AVs as shared mobility-on-demand (MoD), also known as Shared AVs (SAVs), are also attracting attention. We are evaluating the impact the impact and appropriate operation methods of SAV using Agent-based simulation. Agent-based simulation can capture the interaction between individuals and vehicles, making it suitable for SAV analysis.

Such analysis involves replicating and reproducing existing travel demand, and conducting stated preference surveys to estimate the travel demand for non-existent modes such as AVs. In addition, we are evaluating ways to improve the interpretability and validity of Agent-based simulation studies of autonomous vehicles.

We are also evaluating the implications of introducing autonomous vehicles on mid- to long-term household decisions such as changes in residential location. To that extent, we first evaluated changes in accessibility levels as a result of the introduction of AVs, given different assumptions of fleet size and value of time. Findings suggest that AVs will generally increase accessibility for individuals and households, but this increase is considerably larger outside urban centers, which might promote further suburbanization and urban sprawl.

Evaluating the impacts of autonomous vehicles on transportation and cities

Related research articles