Pilot project purgatory? Assessing automated vehicle pilot projects in U.S. cities

Devon Mcaslan,Farah Najar Arevalo,Thaddeus R Miller,David A King

doi:10.1057/s41599-021-01006-2

Abstract

Pilot projects have emerged in cities globally as a way to experiment with the utilization of a suite of smart mobility and emerging transportation technologies. Automated vehicles (AVs) have become central tools for such projects as city governments and industry explore the use and impact of this emerging technology. This paper presents a large-scale assessment of AV pilot projects in U.S. cities to understand how pilot projects are being used to examine the risks and benefits of AVs, how cities integrate these potentially transformative technologies into conventional policy and planning, and how and what they are learning about this technology and its future opportunities and risks. Through interviews with planning practitioners and document analysis, we demonstrate that the approaches cities take for AVs differ significantly, and often lack coherent policy goals. Key findings from this research include: (1) a disconnect between the goals of the pilot projects and a city’s transportation goals; (2) cities generally lack a long-term vision for how AVs fit into future mobility systems and how they might help address transportation goals; (3) an overemphasis of non-transportation benefits of AV pilots projects; (4) AV pilot projects exhibit a lack of policy learning and iteration; and (5) cities are not leveraging pilot projects for public benefits. Overall, urban and transportation planners and decision makers show a clear interest to discover how AVs can be used to address transportation challenges in their communities, but our research shows that while AV pilot projects purport to do this, while having numerous outcomes, they have limited value for informing transportation policy and planning questions around AVs. We also find that AV pilot projects, as presently structured, may constrain planners’ ability to re-think transportation systems within the context of rapid technological change.

Highlights

Automated vehicles (AVs) have developed from an idea to reality over the last decade, which has led to substantial scholarly and policy interest about how cities should incorporate them in planning activities (e.g., Duarte and Ratti, 2018)
This paper investigates how cities are using pilot projects as an urban planning and policy tool to learn about how AVs can help them meet their transportation goals, how AVs fit into their transportation futures, and to develop policy to guide the development and deployment of AVs
We examine the decision-making processes behind why cities develop AV pilot projects, what their motivations are for developing pilot projects, and how their pilots are anticipated to inform future planning actions

Summary

Introduction

Automated vehicles (AVs) have developed from an idea to reality over the last decade, which has led to substantial scholarly and policy interest about how cities should incorporate them in planning activities (e.g., Duarte and Ratti, 2018). Transportation policy and planning literature generally support this perspective (e.g., Tettamanti et al, 2016; Duarte and Ratti, 2018; Nikitas et al, 2021), with the caveat that urban and regional planning organizations need to be engaged with the AV industry to effectively plan for and manage this emerging technology (Creger et al, 2019; Legacy et al, 2019; Steckler et al, 2021). Others, including science and technology studies scholars, are more skeptical, interrogating assumptions about human behavior, politics, and the surrounding environment that get built into the algorithmic and technological components of AVs (Stilgoe, 2018a, 2018b; Stilgoe and Cohen, 2021) and challenging the purported benefits of a technological fix to complex urban problems (Bailey and Erickson, 2019)

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