Are shared automated vehicles good for public- or private-transport-oriented cities (or neither)?

Journal Article (2024)
Author(s)

Andres Fielbaum (University of Sydney)

B. Pudane (TU Delft - Transport and Logistics)

Research Group
Transport and Logistics
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2024.104373
More Info
expand_more
Publication Year
2024
Language
English
Research Group
Transport and Logistics
Volume number
136
Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Abstract

Simulation studies suggest that Shared Automated Vehicles (SAVs) could reduce the total vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) thanks to efficiently pooling multiple users in one vehicle. However, mode choice studies indicate that SAVs would attract mostly public transport users, leading to an increase in VKT. This paper is among the first to combine these operational and behavioural expectations and the first to do so analytically. In our theoretical set-up, travellers choose between car, public transport, and SAVs, depending on their individual valuation of private travel and other attributes of each mode. We find that the introduction of SAVs lead to a VKT change in public-transport-oriented cities ranging from a small decrease to a large increase, where the latter is true for plausible parameter settings and hence is a cautionary point for SAV-introduction policies. Conversely, SAVs would attract only few travellers in private-transport-oriented cities and therefore would not significantly impact VKT.