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 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.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-018-9937-9
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/00494488
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Copyright © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media New York. The contents of this paper reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views or policies of the Transportation Research Board or the National Academy of Sciences.
• Authors:
  • Harb, Mustapha
  • 0000-0002-5469-1770
  • Xiao, Yu
  • Circella, Giovanni
  • Mokhtarian, Patricia
  • Walker, Joan
• Publication Date: 2018-11

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: References;
• Pagination: pp 1671-1685
• Serial:
  • Transportation
  • Volume: 45
  • Issue Number: 6
  • Publisher: Springer
  • ISSN: 0049-4488
  • EISSN: 1572-9435
  • Serial URL: http://link.springer.com/journal/11116

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Automatic data collection systems; Chauffeurs; Intelligent vehicles; Travel behavior
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01691568
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jan 28 2019 10:13AM