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ObjectiveIdentify factors that impact parents’ decisions about allowing an unaccompanied child to ride in an autonomous vehicle (AV). BackgroundAVs are being tested in several U.S. cities and on highways in multiple states. Meanwhile, suburban parents are using ridesharing services to shuttle children from school to extracurricular activities. Parents may soon be able to hire AVs to transport children. MethodNineteen parents of 8- to 16-year-old children, and some of their children, rode in a driving simulator in autonomous mode, then were interviewed. Parents also participated in focus groups. Topics included minimum age for solo child passengers, types of trips unaccompanied children might take, and vehicle features needed to support child passengers. ResultsParents would require two-way audio communication and prefer video feeds of vehicle interiors, seatbelt checks, automatic locking, secure passenger identification, and remote access to vehicle information. Parents cited convenience as the greatest benefit and fear that AVs could not protect passengers during unplanned trip interruptions as their greatest concern. ConclusionManufacturers have an opportunity to design family-friendly AVs from the outset, rather than retrofit them to be safe for child passengers. More research, especially usability studies where families interact with technology prototypes, is needed to understand how AV design impacts child passengers. ApplicationPotential applications of this research include not only designing vehicles that can be used to safely transport children, seniors who no longer drive, and individuals with disabilities but also developing regulations, policies, and societal infrastructure to support safe child transport via AVs.
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SCCS: Smart Cloud Commuting System with Shared Autonomous Vehicles
In this paper we advocate a forward-looking, ambitious and disruptive smart cloud commuting system (SCCS) for future smart cities based on shared AVs. Employing giant pools of AVs of varying sizes, SCCS seeks to supplant and integrate various modes of transport in a unified, on-demand fashion, and provides passengers with a fast, convenient, and low cost transport service for their daily commuting needs. To explore feasibility and efficiency gains of the proposed SCCS, we model SCCS as a queueing system with passengers' trip demands (as jobs) being served by the AVs (as servers). Using a 1-year real trip dataset from Shenzhen China, we quantify (i) how design choices, such as the numbers of depots and AVs, affect the passenger waiting time and vehicle utilization; and (ii) how much efficiency gains (i.e., reducing the number of service vehicles, and improving the vehicle utilization) can be obtained by SCCS comparing to the current taxi system. Our results demonstrate that the proposed SCCS system can serve the trip demands with 22% fewer vehicles and 37% more vehicle utilization, which shed lights on the design feasibility of future smart transportation system.
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- PAR ID:
- 10225183
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Big Data
- ISSN:
- 2372-2096
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tbdata.2020.3041263
