Anticipating long-distance travel shifts due to self-driving vehicles

Abstract

Increasing population and travel demand has prompted new efforts to model travel demand across the United States. One such model is rJourney that estimates travel demand among thousands of regions and models mode and destination choice. rJourney includes records representing 1.17 billion long-distance trips throughout the year 2010. Although inter-regional impacts caused by an increase of automated vehicles (AVs) has been investigated, there is little research on inter-regional travel and how longer distance destination and mode choices will change. Because of conveniences offered by AVs, the value of travel time of drivers is expected to fall, thus reducing the generalized cost of AV travel. To initially analyze the impacts of AVs in the United States, a new AV mode was added to a subset of the rJourney mode and destination choice models. With an initial scenario assuming an operating cost of AVs that is 118% of traditional cars, two outcomes are observed that are solely based on model results. First, the attractiveness of AVs severely digs into the airline travel market, reducing airline revenues to 53%. Second, the introduction of AVs results in a shift of destination choice, increasing travel in further distances for personal vehicles, but favoring closer distances across all modes, for an overall 6.7% decline in US passenger-miles traveled on existing long-distance trips. While this preliminary research has revealed an initial perspective on how an existing model can support AVs, the increasing availability of data as AVs emerge will refine nationwide long-distance modeling.