Vehicles

Occasionally, change occurs so rapidly it seems the world is spinning faster than ever. Technology changes occurring in roadways and bridges today are amazing, to say the least. Motorists will soon experience roadway technology never imagined in the past. The transportation sector is definitely a change leader in the U.S.

Many big-name insurers have stopped offering any form of sexual-assault coverage to ridesharing companies because large claims they’ve paid have made it too risky, experts say.

The Indiana Toll Road in the US has reduced traffic incidents by 30 per cent using Extreme Networks intelligent transportation system. The Indiana Toll Road Concession Company (ITRCC) deployed the software-driven network, which uses Extreme’s Smart OmniEdge technology to provide real-time updates on traffic patterns, enabling safer, more coordinated use of the roadway.

In many countries the revenue from gasoline taxes is used to fund highways and other transportation infrastructure. As the number of electric vehicles on the road increases, this raises questions about the effectiveness and equity of this financing mechanism. In this paper, we ask whether electric vehicle drivers should pay a mileage tax.

Since EV drivers zip past gas taxes, they don’t contribute to the federal fund for road maintenance. A new working paper tries to determine whether plug-ins should pay up.

Seniors need transportation alternatives more than ever, but many are intimidated by ride-hailing apps." This article explores how transportation network companies are providing transportation options for seniors.

We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history. By 2030, within 10 years of regulatory approval of autonomous vehicles (AVs), 95% of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals, in a new business model we call “transportas-a-service” (TaaS). The TaaS disruption will have enormous implications across the transportation and oil industries, decimating entire portions of their value chains, causing oil demand and prices to plummet, and destroying trillions of dollars in investor value — but also creating trillions of dollars in new business opportunities, consumer surplus and GDP growth.

This paper presents ten key challenge areas that need to be at the center of automated vehicle discussions across all sectors and stakeholders, along with a glossary of key terms. It is intended to serve as a discussion guide and orientation piece for people entering the conversation from a wide variety of perspectives, including advocacy, public policy, research, injury prevention, and technology developers.

As more states and cities consider taxes on TNC services, policymakers should be cautious and thoughtful about how their decisions affect transportation behavior. As services like TNCs proliferate around the globe, it is important to understand what these fees are, what purpose they intend to serve, and how they fit into broader metropolitan transportation policies.

The purpose of this report is to provide information on TNC activity in San Francisco, in order to help the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (Transportation Authority) fulfill its role as the Congestion Management Agency for San Francisco County. The report is also intended to inform the Transportation Authority board which is comprised of the members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, as well as state and local policy-makers in other arenas, and the general public, on the size, location and time-of-day characteristics of the TNC market in San Francisco.

Crash report investigating a death resulting from a collision between a pedestrian and a self-driving car.

Autonomous vehicles use sensing and communication technologies to navigate safely and efficiently with little or no input from the driver. These driverless technologies will create an unprecedented revolution in how people move, and policymakers will need appropriate tools to plan for and analyze the large impacts of novel navigation systems. In this paper we derive semi-parametric estimates of the willingness to pay for automation. We use data from a nationwide online panel of 1,260 individuals who answered a vehicle-purchase discrete choice experiment focused on energy efficiency and autonomous features. Several models were estimated with the choice micro-data, including a conditional logit with deterministic consumer heterogeneity, a parametric random parameter logit, and a semi-parametric random parameter logit.

This report summarizes findings from a three-year collaboration between the World Economic Forum and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to explore how autonomous vehicles could reshape the future of urban mobility. The project built on the collective insights generated from the Autonomous and Urban Mobility Working Group (Working Group) of the System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Mobility, composed of roughly 35 business executives from diverse industries (including automotive, technology, logistics, insurance, utilities and infrastructure) that convened for 10 full-day workshops and numerous conference calls.

In the last ten years transit use in Southern California has fallen significantly. This report investigates that falling transit use. We define Southern California as the six counties that participate in the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) – Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Imperial. We examine patterns of transit service and patronage over time and across the region, and consider an array of explanations for falling transit use: declining transit service levels, eroding transit service quality, rising fares, falling fuel prices, the growth of Lyft and Uber, the migration of frequent transit users to outlying neighborhoods with less transit service, and rising vehicle ownership. While all of these factors probably play some role, we conclude that the most significant factor is increased motor vehicle access, particularly among low-income households that have traditionally supplied the region with its most frequent and reliable transit users.

The development of self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles is accelerating. Here’s how they could affect consumers and companies.

This report by KPMG discusses how the new market will look like for autonomous future. It talks about transportation market, new customer demand, change of economic models, trip mission, and other market changes.

The next time you need to book an Uber home from Pearson Airport, you won’t need your phone to do so. Toronto’s largest airport has just implemented a new Uber pilot that makes it easier for travellers to get home, as smartphones are no longer needed to book a ride.

One of the more confusing words frequently associated with robocars (and all discussion of the future of transportation) is "shared." Unfortunately, this means two very different things, with quite different consequences.

Ford and other companies say the industry overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles, which still struggle to anticipate what other drivers and pedestrians will do.

As more people make the shift to sustainable mobility options like e-scooters, cities are evolving their transportation infrastructure to combat car dominance and to allow human-scaled modes to thrive. In addition to creating dedicated spaces for people to ride shared micro-mobility devices, this transition also includes creating space for them to park when not in use. To explore how cities should think about parking and micro-mobility, Bird sat down for a conversation with parking expert Donald Shoup.

Alphabet’s self-driving car company Waymo has built the world’s smartest vehicles with access to the world’s best artificial intelligence, but there’s one barrier that it might have underestimated: people.

To help decision-makers understand the impact of AV technology on regional plans, modeling tools should anticipate automated vehicles’ effect on transportation networks and traveler choices.This research uses the Seattle region’s activity based travel model to test a range of travel behavior impacts from AV technology development. The existing model was not originally designed with automated vehicles in mind, so some modifications to the model assumptions are described in areas of roadway capacity, user values of time, and parking costs. Larger structural model changes are not yet considered.

"While recent policies directed toward multimodal or complete streets have encouraged increased funding for bicycle- and pedestrian oriented projects, many streets are still plagued by unsafe conditions. This is especially true for one-way streets, which studies show often create unsafe crossing conditions. This study evaluates changes to street dynamics after a two-way street conversion in Louisville, Kentucky. We find that traffic flow increased after implementation of two-way flow, but traffic accidents decreased. We also note other ancillary benefits, such as increase in property values and reduced crime. These results provide evidence that conversions can promote mobility, safety, and livability."

This article highlights the disaster that could be the continuation of everyone thinking they need their own car for each trip they take and how we need to get serious about expanding the sharing economy.

The article outlines the scope of the emerging transportation technologies and how far they can go. It doesn't have to be just about the autonomous cars and how they interact and react with our communities, but how we can work on preparing the rest of the environment to also interact with them.

How safe should highly automated vehicles (HAVs) be before they are allowed on the roads for consumer use? This question underpins much of the debate around how and when to introduce and use the technology so that the potential risks from HAVs are minimized and the benefits maximized. In this report, we use the RAND Model of Automated Vehicle Safety to compare road fatalities over time under (1) a policy that allows HAVs to be deployed for consumer use when their safety performance is just 10 percent better than that of the average human driver and (2) a policy that waits to deploy HAVs only once their safety performance is 75 or 90 percent better than that of average human drivers — what some might consider nearly perfect. We find that, in the long term, under none of the conditions we explored does waiting for significant safety gains result in fewer fatalities. At best, fatalities are comparable, but, at worst, waiting has high human costs — in some cases, more than half a million lives. Moreover, the conditions that might lead to comparable fatalities — rapid improvement in HAV safety performance that can occur without widespread deployment — seem implausible. This suggests that the opportunity cost, in terms of lives saved, for waiting for better HAV performance may indeed be large. This evidence can help decisionmakers better understand the human cost of different policy choices governing HAV safety and set policies that save more lives.

This blog post summarizes a larger article written by University of Michigan faculty member Saif Benjaafar's research on smart technology. It specifically focuses on his analysis of ride-sharing companies.

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority will test self-driving shuttles on Treasure Island, as well as introduce a toll system from the Bay Bridge to the island.

One of the big promises of self-driving vehicles is the idea that autonomous vehicles will liberate people from driving. In this vision of the future, passengers will scan news reports on phones and tablets, pour-over notes and briefings for important meetings, and view videos on their handheld devices. They will reclaim the hours once wasted clinging to a steering wheel. Unless they end up developing a headache or becoming dizzy, drowsy, or nauseated.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) represent a potentially disruptive yet beneficial change to our transportation system. This new technology has the potential to impact vehicle safety, congestion, and travel behavior. All told, major social AV impacts in the form of crash savings, travel time reduction, fuel efficiency and parking benefits are estimated to approach $2000 to per year per AV, and may eventually approach nearly $4000 when comprehensive crash costs are accounted for. Yet barriers to implementation and mass-market penetration remain. Initial costs will likely be unaffordable. Licensing and testing standards in the U.S. are being developed at the state level, rather than nationally, which may lead to inconsistencies across states. Liability details remain undefined, security concerns linger, and without new privacy standards, a default lack of privacy for personal travel may become the norm. The impacts and interactions with other components of the transportation system, as well as implementation details, remain uncertain. To address these concerns, the federal government should expand research in these areas and create a nationally recognized licensing framework for AVs, determining appropriate standards for liability, security, and data privacy.

With AVs on the brink of roll-out, what is next? How do our streets evolve and where does our capital begin to go? This article discusses some possibilities on the ways we may be able to better our streets without widening the roads to fit more cars.

"Cruise, the startup General Motors acquired to develop its self-driving car, will launch an autonomous taxi service on the gnarly, crowded streets of San Francisco," CEO Dan Ammann said Wednesday. It will not, however, do so by the end of this year, the deadline it set for itself in 2017. Instead, Cruise will spend the rest of 2019 expanding its tests across the city and working on the less technical aspects of running such a service, from charging its electric cars to working with regulators to soothing a public that may be wary of robots roaming the roads.

We review the history, current developments, projected future trends and environmental impacts of automated vehicles (AVs) and on-demand mobility, and explore potential synergies. Many automobile manufacturers and Google plan to release AVs between 2017 and 2020, with potential benefits including increased safety, more efficient road use, increased driver productivity and energy savings. Combining on-demand mobility and AVs may amplify adoption of both, and further lower energy use and GHG emissions through the use of small, efficient shared AVs.

The introduction of fully autonomous vehicles will constitute perhaps the largest change to everyday transportation in living memory and is predicted to deliver a wide range of environmental, social and economic benefits. However, the route to full automation is also likely to involve significant challenges, with public attitudes playing an important role in determining the level of success with which the technology is introduced. This report outlines the results of a survey of 233 people measuring current attitudes to autonomous vehicles.