An Assessment of Autonomous Vehicles: Traffic Impacts and Infrastructure Needs—Final Report

The project began by understanding the current state of practice and trends. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA’s) four-level taxonomy for automated vehicles was used to classify smart driving technologies and infrastructure needs. The project used surveys to analyze and gain an understanding of the U.S. general public’s perception towards such technologies and their willingness to adopt such technologies. Respondents were asked several anticipatory questions including their technology preferences (buying/selling their vehicles or simply adding new technologies to their current vehicles), and their comfort with and willingness to pay for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The team found that advanced automation technologies are not yet popular. This research report also describes the potential crash, congestion, and other impacts of CAVs in Texas, and provides initial monetary estimates of those impacts, at various levels of market penetration. The findings indicate that CAVs will lead to increased vehicle miles traveled (VMT) because, essentially, drivers experience falling travel time burdens. Their values of travel time that make using a vehicle “costly” tend to decrease because they are more comfortable heading to more distant locations and those unable to drive themselves, such as the handicapped, can now safely travel.

• Record URL:
  https://library.ctr.utexas.edu/ctr-publications/0-6847-1.pdf
• 
• Summary URL:
  https://library.ctr.utexas.edu/ctr-publications/psr/0-6847-s.pdf
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Report date December 2016; published March 2017.
• Corporate Authors:

  University of Texas, Austin

  Center for Transportation Research
  3925 W. Braker Lane, 4th Floor
  Austin, TX  United States  78759

  Texas Department of Transportation

  Research and Technology Implementation Office, P.O. Box 5080
  Austin, TX  United States  78763-5080

  Federal Highway Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Authors:
  • Kockelman, Kara M
  • 0000-0003-4763-1304
  • Boyles, Stephen
  • Stone, Peter
  • Fagnant, Dan
  • Patel, Rahul
  • Levin, Michael W
  • Sharon, Guni
  • Simoni, Michele
  • Albert, Michael
  • Fritz, Hagen
  • Hutchinson, Rebecca
  • Bansal, Prateek
  • Domnenko, Gleb
  • Bujanovic, Pavle
  • Kim, Bumsik
  • Pourrahmani, Elham
  • Agrawal, Sudesh
  • Li, Tianxin
  • Hanna, Josiah
  • Nichols, Aqshems
  • Li, Jia
• Publication Date: 2017-3

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Appendices; Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 182p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Consumer preferences; Costs; Evaluation and assessment; Impacts; Infrastructure; Intelligent vehicles; Market share; Mobile communication systems; Needs assessment; Surveys; Traffic congestion; Travel time; Vehicle miles of travel
• Geographic Terms: Texas
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01633304
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: FHWA/TX-17/0-6847-1, 0-6847-1
• Contract Numbers: 0-6847
• Files: TRIS, ATRI, USDOT, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Apr 28 2017 10:42AM