Projecting travelers into a world of self-driving vehicles: estimating travel behavior implications via a naturalistic experiment

Automated driving technologies are currently penetrating the market, and the coming fully autonomous cars will have far-reaching, yet largely unknown, implications. A critical unknown is the impact on traveler behavior, which in turn impacts sustainability, the economy, and wellbeing. Most behaviora...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Transportation (Dordrecht) Vol. 45; no. 6; pp. 1671 - 1685
Main Authors: Harb, Mustapha, Xiao, Yu, Circella, Giovanni, Mokhtarian, Patricia L., Walker, Joan L.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Springer US 01.11.2018
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Automation
Automobiles
Autonomous cars
Autonomous vehicles
Behavior
Behavior change
Behavior modification
Collision avoidance
Driving
Driving ability
Economic Geography
Economics
Economics and Finance
Engineering Economics
Experiments
Human behavior
Human factors
Impact analysis
Innovation/Technology Management
Logistics
Market entry
Marketing
Millennials
Network analysis
Occupancy
Organization
Regional/Spatial Science
Retirees
Retirement
Simulators
Travel
Travel demand
Well being
Willingness to pay
Naturalistic experiment
Self-driving vehicles
VMT
Travel behavior
Chauffeur
ISSN:0049-4488, 1572-9435
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Automated driving technologies are currently penetrating the market, and the coming fully autonomous cars will have far-reaching, yet largely unknown, implications. A critical unknown is the impact on traveler behavior, which in turn impacts sustainability, the economy, and wellbeing. Most behavioral studies, to date, either focus on safety and human factors (driving simulators; test beds), assume travel behavior implications (microsimulators; network analysis), or ask about hypothetical scenarios that are unfamiliar to the subjects (stated preference studies). Here we present a different approach, which is to use a naturalistic experiment to project people into a world of self-driving cars. We mimic potential life with a privately-owned self-driving vehicle by providing 60 h of free chauffeur service for each participating household for use within a 7-day period. We seek to understand the changes in travel behavior as the subjects adjust their travel and activities during the chauffeur week when, as in a self-driving vehicle, they are explicitly relieved of the driving task. In this first pilot application, our sample consisted of 13 subjects from the San Francisco Bay area, drawn from three cohorts: millennials, families, and retirees. We tracked each subject’s travel for 3 weeks (the chauffeur week, 1 week before and 1 week after) and conducted surveys and interviews. During the chauffeur week, we observed sizable increases in vehicle-miles traveled and number of trips, with a more pronounced increase in trips made in the evening and for longer distances and a substantial proportion of “zero-occupancy” vehicle-miles traveled.
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ISSN:0049-4488
1572-9435
DOI:10.1007/s11116-018-9937-9