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Abstract Pilot projects have emerged in cities globally as a way to experiment with the utilization of a suite of smart mobility and emerging transportation technologies. Automated vehicles (AVs) have become central tools for such projects as city governments and industry explore the use and impact of this emerging technology. This paper presents a large-scale assessment of AV pilot projects in U.S. cities to understand how pilot projects are being used to examine the risks and benefits of AVs, how cities integrate these potentially transformative technologies into conventional policy and planning, and how and what they are learning about this technology and its future opportunities and risks. Through interviews with planning practitioners and document analysis, we demonstrate that the approaches cities take for AVs differ significantly, and often lack coherent policy goals. Key findings from this research include: (1) a disconnect between the goals of the pilot projects and a city’s transportation goals; (2) cities generally lack a long-term vision for how AVs fit into future mobility systems and how they might help address transportation goals; (3) an overemphasis of non-transportation benefits of AV pilots projects; (4) AV pilot projects exhibit a lack of policy learning and iteration; and (5) cities are not leveraging pilot projects for public benefits. Overall, urban and transportation planners and decision makers show a clear interest to discover how AVs can be used to address transportation challenges in their communities, but our research shows that while AV pilot projects purport to do this, while having numerous outcomes, they have limited value for informing transportation policy and planning questions around AVs. We also find that AV pilot projects, as presently structured, may constrain planners’ ability to re-think transportation systems within the context of rapid technological change.
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Shifting, Not Shrinking? Exploring Labor Roles in Traditional Automated Door-to-Door Transportation Service
Systems engineering has often concerned itself with how operator and customer roles change when systems change. In the context of automated vehicles (AVs), it has been assumed that operators will be removed from the system architecture; however, new insights reveal that the role of operators, typically thought of as drivers, has been transformed, not eliminated. In this study, we identify how different types of door-to-door transportation services use varying organizational architectures to achieve required functions, and explore how these architectures might this change with emergence of automated door-to-door transportation services. We draw on prior research, archival documents, and semi-structured interviews with AV technical and operational experts to identify and detail required functions for these services. Preliminary results reveal that, counter to the commonly-held belief, the structures of commercial AV services more closely parallel traditional taxi organizations rather than current ride-hailing services based on their capital cost and human labor requirements. Future research will explore short and long-term development pathways for AV systems and their associated structural and functional requirements. While the structures of these AV companies will continue to develop alongside the automation technologies, early explorations of AV organizations can reveal multiple possible development pathways for AV services and highlight potentially desirable or undesirable intermediary stages.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2125677
- PAR ID:
- 10448592
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2023
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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