Title: What Can We Learn about Trav­el and Safe­ty Impli­ca­tions from Par­tial­ly Auto­mat­ed Vehi­cle Use?
Speak­er: Chan­dra Bhat
Abstract: Inves­ti­gat­ing the poten­tial activ­i­ty-trav­el behav­ior impacts of ful­ly autonomous vehi­cles (des­ig­nat­ed as Lev­el 5 automa­tion on the Soci­ety of Auto­mo­tive Engi­neers or SAE scale) can only be under­tak­en today through stat­ed pref­er­ence or SP sur­veys (that is, ask­ing indi­vid­u­als how they may change their mobil­i­ty pat­terns in a hypo­thet­i­cal envi­ron­ment with a Lev­el 5 vehi­cle). But indi­vid­u­als may not be in a posi­tion to pro­vide appro­pri­ate respons­es when thrust into a hypo­thet­i­cal envi­ron­ment that is dif­fi­cult to con­jure up. In this regard, SAE Lev­el 1 fea­tures (such as adap­tive cruise con­trol or park­ing assist fea­tures) are in most new vehi­cles today, while many high­er-end vehi­cles today also achieve Lev­el 2 automa­tion (such as vehi­cles with adap­tive cruise con­trol, hands-free lane chang­ing, and self-park­ing). The avail­abil­i­ty and use of these vehi­cles today, albeit with low­er lev­els of automa­tion, can pro­vide impor­tant and reli­able insights on how trav­el pat­terns may change with advanc­ing tech­nol­o­gy. In this paper, we pro­pose to exam­ine poten­tial mobil­i­ty changes due to tech­nol­o­gy fea­tures that exist today in vehi­cles. Impor­tant­ly, while some ear­li­er stud­ies have exam­ined con­sumer accep­tance of exist­ing vehi­cle tech­nol­o­gy, we go beyond con­sumer accep­tance to also exam­ine how indi­vid­u­als with and with­out automa­tion fea­tures in their vehi­cles dif­fer in their annu­al vehi­cle miles of trav­el (VMT). Poten­tial impli­ca­tions for road­way safe­ty due to VMT changes are also discussed.