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https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27432/critical-issues-in-transportation-for-2024-and-beyond

Modeling Americans' Autonomous Vehicle Preferences: A Focus on Dynamic Ride-Sharing, Privacy & Long-Distance Mode Choices

Rapid advances in technology have accelerated the timeline for public use of fully-automated and communications-connected vehicles. Public opinion on self-driving vehicles or AVs is evolving rapidly, and many behavioral questions have not yet been addressed. This study emphasizes AV mode choices, including Americans’ willingness to pay (WTP) to ride with a stranger in a shared AV fleet vehicle on various trip types and the long-distance travel impacts of AVs. 2,588 complete responses to a stated-preference survey with 70 questions provide valuable insights on privacy concerns and crash ethics, safety and ride-sharing with strangers, long-distance travel and preferences for smarter vehicles and transport systems. While the starting sample data were relatively demographically unbiased, Texans were purposefully over-sampled, and all statistics adjusted/corrected (via sample weights) to match US demographics on gender, education, income, and age. Weighted results suggest that Americans are willing to pay, on average, $2073 to own AVs over conventional vehicles and an additional $1078 to maintain/include a manual driving option on such vehicles. Ride-sharing will be popular at 75¢ per mile, under most scenarios, and many Americans are willing to pay $1, on average, to anonymize their trip ends’ addresses. Most are also willing to let children 16 years of age and older have unsupervised access to AVs (both privately owned and shared). Nearly 50% of long-distance travel appears captured by AVs and SAVs in the future, rather than airlines, at least for one-way trip distances up to 500 miles.Two hurdle models (which allow for a high share of zero-value responses) were estimated on the weighted dataset: one to predict WTP to share a ride and another to determine WTP to anonymize location while using AVs. The first two-part model shows how travel time delays, person and household attributes, and land use densities can significantly affect Americans’ willingness to share rides. The second hurdle model suggests that traveler age, presence of children, household income, vehicle ownership and driver’s license status are major predictors of one’s WTP to obscure pick-up and drop-off locations. A binary logit was used to model current mode choice for long-distance (over 50 miles, one-way) travel (between one’s private car and an airplane), with household income as the leading predictor. On average, older Americans and/or those with children prefer such travel by car. Finally, A multinomial logit anticipated mode shifts when AVs and SAVs become available and affordable. Everything else constant, private cars remain preferred by older people, but SAVs may be used in the future for more business travel.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB10 Standing Committee on Traveler Behavior and Values.
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    ,    
  • Authors:
    • Gurumurthy, Krishna Murthy
    • Kockelman, Kara M
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2019

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: References;
  • Pagination: 6p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01697599
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 19-01838
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Mar 1 2019 3:51PM