University of California Institute of Transportation Studies

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).