Abstract
After years of research and development, companies are now operating fully driverless shared-use automated vehicle-enabled mobility services (SAMS) or “robo-taxis“ in Arizona and California. SAMS offer several potential benefits to travelers and society including reducing vehicle ownership, parking demand, congestion, crashes, energy consumption, and emissions, as well as increasing roadway capacity, mobility, and accessibility. Moreover, previous research by our team found that SAMS can provide significant job accessibility benefits to workers in California. To better understand the equity implications of the job accessibility benefits from SAMS, we analyzed the distribution of SAMS benefits across different segments of the population (e.g., low- vs. high-income, young vs. old).
To measure the accessibility benefits of SAMS, we use the logsum of a hierarchical work destination and commute mode choice model—a monetary measure of consumer surplus consistent with microeconomic and utility maximization theories. If a new commute mode (e.g., SAMS) is made available to travelers, and that new mode is competitive with existing modes in terms of travel time and travel cost, then the new mode will improve a traveler’s job accessibility. For more information, please see our previous study on measuring the job access benefits of SAMS2.
