Transport Choices and Vehicle Ownership with Autonomous Vehicles : A modelling effort on car ownership, transport mode choice and travel demand with Driverless Technology.

Sammanfattning: Transport is one of the basic needs of a functioning society. Unfortunately, transport also pollutes our cities and release greenhouses gases. Driverless technology is a technology predicted to disrupt the future transport system, and perhaps change how we travel from private cars to shared vehicles. This study focuses on the aspect of privately owned versus shared driverless vehicles, to create more knowledge of how the future transport system will look. A utility-based demand model is used to find the demand for private and shared transport when driverless vehicles are available. The utility of different transport options is estimated by looking at earlier studies about the performance of driverless cars, driverless buses and shared driverless taxis, which is used as input for the utility model. The results indicate that driverless technology will not be a catalyst that makes transport go from private to shared. While driverless buses can improve public transport, and shared driverless taxis outcompete current taxis, driverless technology will also improve private vehicles. The results in this study imply that the sustainability improvements earlier reports have predicted with a high use of shared driverless transportation might not materialise unless efforts are done to increase use of shared transportation.