Shaping Autonomous Vehicle Travel Behavior

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Our class recently heard a great presentation from Adam Millard-Ball, an Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz, on autonomous vehicles (AVs). AVs are an increasingly exciting topic of debate, especially among planning professionals. How should AVs be regulated? What kinds of land use or transportation demand management policies should planners put in place to prepare for AVs? How should we incentivize the sharing of these modes, rather than continuing the single-occupancy vehicle epidemic currently permeating cities? Perhaps a good place to start is understanding how AVs would work in our existing transportation system. Millard-Ball laid out a very clear picture of how privately-owned AVs would likely respond to current conditions.

Citing a study done for the City of San Francisco, Millard-Ball shared findings on how AVs would behave after dropping off its owner at work. Assuming these AVs are electric and that roads are free while parking remains costly, the study found that 40% of AVs would continue to cruise until their owners were ready to be picked up. It would actually be cheaper to move slowly in AV-congested streets than to find and pay for parking. The other 60% of AVs would behave as follows: park as before (39%), park on-street (13%), or go home (8%). Millard-Ball's primary recommendation in combating cruising among AVs would be to implement congestion pricing on roads. But how exactly would AVs respond in this scenario?

Let's assume that planners succeed in passing congestion pricing, but fail to make AV sharing popular. Most people own a personal AV and have to pay more for roads than for parking, which limits cruising. In this universe, planners still must grapple with massive parking demand. Considering that parking takes up so much precious land already, should we encourage more vehicles to go back home? What would be the implications of doing this? While we hope that planners can shape the AV sharing utopia of our dreams, it would be interesting to see a follow-up study that looks into this personal AV scenario further.




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