Behavioural response to automated vehicles

Abstract

Although fully-automated vehicles (FAVs) are not yet allowed on public roads and are barely present in people’s daily lives, according to experts their wide implementation will happen within the next few decades. The technology is expected to bring major benefits in terms of safety, traffic flow efficiency and environmental impact. Furthermore, by eliminating the necessity of actively steering the vehicle, automated vehicles (AVs) are expected to bring extra free time during the day to perform activities, as well as increase mobility of some excluded societal groups (e.g. elderly). However, taking away the burden of driving might also bring negative results. The convenience of the technology might encourage people to travel further and more often. Moreover, AVs users might transfer some of the activities from the traditional environments into the vehicle (e.g. work). The associated rearrangement of daily activity plans might have an impact on travel and residential location choices, possibly leading to further increase in overall travel distance. In such way, the expected positive impact of the technology could be compromised.
For that reason, it is necessary to examine behavioural response to AVs, namely the way travel time will be used in the vehicle and its consequences for daily activity plans, travel patterns and residential location choices. In order to fill in this scientific gap five focus groups were conducted. The participants were confronted with a simplified scenario of the future after broad AVs implementation and were asked a set of questions regarding the aforementioned topics. It was found that, in contrary to the current modes, time inside AVs will be perceived not in terms of burden or opportunity, but rather in terms of pure opportunity. The participants perceive AV time as an extension of either work or private time. In context of daily activity plans it brings about a number of possible behavioral adaptations. In case of regular commuters, a willingness to use the in-vehicle time to release pressure from daily life was often identified, whereas people with less stationary jobs claim that the AV would allow them to bring more flexibility into their daily plans, or move their actual office or even the entire business into the vehicle.
However, the findings regarding daily activity plans do not provide a clear answer on their impact on travel and location decisions. At the same time, a number of advantages of AVs for irregular, long travels was identified, and many participants explicitly expressed their willingness to increase the amount of such travels. The impact of AVs on residential location choices appears to be limited: although people are not willing to move because of the AV, they claim it would still play a significant role in their relocation decisions if it was necessary for other reasons. Moreover, some AV-specific phenomena were discovered, which might have an important significance on the actual AV use: namely increased pressure to perform onboard activities and feeling of “being trapped” in the vehicle. Furthermore, the participants pointed at the striking easiness of making travel decisions in case of AVs, compared to other modes. Although the results bring a valuable indication of possible behavioral adaptation to the technology, one must also take into account limitations of the study. The most important of them is the speculative, imaginary character of the focus groups discussions, simplified future scenario and subjective character of qualitative analysis. Therefore, in the future studies on behavioural adaptation to AVs it is suggested to take a more experimental path, aiming at emulating the actual AV experience as far as possible. In that way the credibility of the findings from the present study could be further validated and extended.