An assessment of the willingness to choose a self-driving bus for an urban trip

Abstract

The development of automated vehicles offers advantages for the transportation systems of the future. As a result, new and unknown challenges within the field of transportation arise. Moreover, there are uncertainties within the behavioural responses of travellers and amongst other things, the changes in the modal split within the transportation market. There is a lack of extensive knowledge of public transport user preferences regarding automated vehicles. In this study, the relative preferences for a trip with a self-driving bus were compared to a trip with a regular bus. To establish this, a stated preference experiment was conducted. Based on the responses of 282 respondents, a mixed logit model including latent variables was estimated. Based on the estimation results, it can be concluded that public transport users currently show a lower preference for the self-driving bus than for the regular bus. Moreover, travellers’ preferences to travel on the autonomous bus improve when no surveillance is present. Travellers with an increased level of trust are found to perceive more utility of a self-driving bus. This effect is stronger for women, which could explain the outcome that women are less likely to travel by autonomous bus than men. These relative preferences result in the self-driving bus being a competitive alternative for short urban trips, which allow for the increase of the travel costs for the self-driving bus compared to the travel costs for the regular bus. At last, the estimation and application outcomes of this study provide an increased understanding of the stated preferences of public transport users for self-driving vehicles operated as public transport services for urban trips.