Assessing the long-term effects of autonomous vehicles: a speculative approach

By Wolfgang Gruel, Joseph M. Stanford. 2016

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years, self-driving cars have generated significant attention and discussion. While it is recognized that a number of technical and legal issues need to be solved, widespread adoption of self-driving vehicles is increasingly considered to be inevitable. However, the long-term effects of this technology are rarely considered and seldom examined in the literature. Among these potential impacts are a number of direct and indirect, positive and negative outcomes, and the net effect in terms of societal benefit or harm is far from clear. In this paper, we identify the several of these outcomes, and we explore conditions in the broader transportation system under which self-driving vehicles may be either harmful or beneficial. We investigate how autonomous operation could affect the attractiveness of traveling by car, how this in turn could affect mode choice, and how changes in mode choice would affect the broader transportation system. The paper considers three speculative scenarios, defined primarily by different behavioral responses to the availability of autonomous driving. The scenarios build on an established system dynamics model that represents the major forces involved in transportation systems. A wide range of outcomes are considered, and potential policy interventions are discussed. Language: en

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Control and Systems Engineering, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc137b3763d32e88492a3cf3ab18b19ed909da44

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Automotive Engineering

1. Francisco J. Bahamonde-Birke
2. B. van Arem
3. Viktoriya Kolarova
4. Felix Steck

In Transportation

1. Dimitris Milakis
2. Francisco J. Bahamonde-Birke
3. B. van Arem
4. Viktoriya Kolarova
5. Felix Steck

Citations in the corpus

• Assessing the effect of autonomous driving on value of travel time savings: A comparison between current and future preferences (2019, background): “…attractiveness of travelling in general, and a shift from non-motorised to motorised modes of transport, as well as increasing the tendency to travel longer distances, by bringing about a change in choice of destination (BahamondeBirke et al., 2018; Wadud et al., 2016; Gruel and Stanford, 2016).”
• Development and transport implications of automated vehicles in the Netherlands: scenarios for 2030 and 2050 (2017, methodology): “…traffic simulation (see van Arem et al., 2006), field experiments and analytical methods (see Rajamani and Shladover, 2001) to system dynamics (see Gruel and Stanford, 2015), agent-based simulation methods (see Fagnant and Kockelman, 2014) and activity-based travel demand models (see Childress et…”