Potential effects of automated driving on vehicle travel demand: A comparison of three case cities

Automated vehicles(AVs)hold the potential to reduce road accidents,mitigate traffic congestion,and improve travel experience.However,the possible countervailing impacts from the changes in underserved populations’vehicle travel demand tend to be overlooked.To determine the vehicle travel demand changes that resulted from underserved populations aged between 6 and 80,this paper explores the latent effect of AVs on vehicle kilometers traveled(VKT)in a fully AV environment using person trip survey data from the cities of Sanya,Shijiazhuang,and Shenzhen in China.This paper uses the natural decline hypothesis of travel demand and proposes a regression model to investigate the difference among the cities’latent vehicle travel demand.Results show that the average VKT of the overall population in Sanya,Shijiazhuang,and Shenzhen increased by 33.4%,47.0%,and46.8%,respectively.The analysis of the regression model confirms that the current travel behavior of individuals can affect the degree of increase in their average VKT.Integrating AVs into public transport,increasing the acceptance of automated shared mobility options,transforming road space use type,and prototyping AV designs with various features and needs are potential methods to cope with the countervailing impacts.The total VKT of the overall population increased by approximately 10%-25%depending on the city.The conclusions of this paper provide informative insights into the evaluation of VKT for underserved populations and contribute to the deployment of AVs to address equity and inclusion issues.

An estimation of vehicle kilometer traveled and on-road emissions using the traffic volume and travel speed on road links in Incheon City

The objective of this study is to estimate the vehicle kilometer traveled（VKT） and on-road emissions using the traffic volume in urban. We estimated two VKT; one is based on registered vehicles and the other is based on traffic volumes. VKT for registered vehicles was 2.11 times greater than that of the applied traffic volumes because each VKT estimation method is different. Therefore, we had to define the inner VKT is moved VKT inner in urban to compare two values. Also, we focused on freight modes because these are discharged much air pollutant emissions. From analysis results, we found middle and large trucks registered in other regions traveled to target city in order to carry freight, target city has included many industrial and logistics areas. Freight is transferred through the harbors,large logistics centers, or via locations before being moved to the final destination. During this process, most freight is moved by middle and large trucks, and trailers rather than small trucks for freight import and export. Therefore, these trucks from other areas are inflow more than registered vehicles. Most emissions from diesel trucks had been overestimated in comparison to VKT from applied traffic volumes in target city. From these findings, VKT is essential based on traffic volume and travel speed on road links in order to estimate accurately the emissions of diesel trucks in target city. Our findings support the estimation of the effect of on-road emissions on urban air quality in Korea.