Research about autonomous vehicles is still in its early stages, mainly because they are operating in so few places, making it difficult to assess their real-world impacts on people.
Lacking that avenue of research, a team from the Technical University of Vienna in Austria have instead combed the few dozen existing modeling studies to get a good read on the “impacts of automated vehicles on travel behavior and land use.”
Here are the highlights of their findings, which were published in the journal Transport Reviews:
- If we move into a future in which a considerable amount of people have personal AVs, their productivity will increase and spending on parking will decrease, but traffic will spike. The researchers estimate that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) will increase between 15 percent and 59 percent.
- Even shared AVs could show an increase in VMT, especially if there are a lot of empty trips taken or if people migrate to shared AVs from other sustainable travel modes, like transit, biking, and walking. The jury is definitely still out on shared AVs, however, because studies show that VMT goes down if people are willing to share rides.
- It’s becoming clearer that AVs will seriously impact transit ridership. This is why it’s so important to work now to make good transit systems much better in serving as the nucleus for how city dwellers get around.
- Private AVs would increase the amount of time people spend in their vehicles.
- Parking is a big deal. If all private vehicle trips were replaced with shared AV trips, more than 90 percent of parking could be eliminated. Even replacing private vehicles with private AVs could reduce the need for parking slightly.
- Shared AVs could go a long way to stem the tide of urban sprawl. But personal AVs would likely have the reverse effect, causing more people to live in outer suburbs and rural areas.
The authors note that the way studies on AVs are performed is very important going forward. “As expected, the results confirm that impacts of AVs on travel behavior and land use are strongly dependent on the assumptions made. The studies reviewed are a first step to investigate the possible impacts of AVs on travel behavior and land use. However, more work is needed to better understand them. Future research should grant a better insight on the socio-demographic groups which will benefit from increased accessibility due to automated driving.”
Photo by UN Geneva/Flickr.