UC Santa Barbara

AVs hold the promise to profoundly alter the way people move around by providing a safer, faster, greener, more accessible and comfortable means of transportation. Yet, the benefits of AVs could also result in undesired consequences like urban sprawl. Before AVs actually take off, how the technology will change transportation networks and urban form is far from certainty. Therefore, it is very important to identify AV adopters and their travel behavior and activity time allocation patterns, in order to make more realistic and accurate evaluations of AV impacts on transportation systems and implications for urban planning. To fill this research gap, three interrelated research questions are formulated and answered in this dissertation. Specifically, Chapter 2 shows that perceived usefulness is an important latent determinant of the intentions to use AVs and background factors such as demographics affect behavior intention both directly and indirectly through the mediator perceived usefulness. Using a multiyear cross-sectional travel survey, Chapter 3 reveals that public acceptance of AVs does change as a result of greater exposure to more information and knowledge about AVs over time. In particular, the population unfamiliar with AVs has declined over the years. Controlling for their socio-demographic characteristics, travel behavior characteristics, and built environment attributes, individuals’ interest in AVs has not changed over time while their concerns have increased across time. Young well-educated male workers in wealthy households are the potential early adopters of AVs given their strong interest in AVs and less concerns. Chapter 4 explores the relationship between individuals’ spatiotemporal activity-travel patterns and their stated propensity to use AVs. Using sequence analysis, clustering techniques, and statistical modeling, the results suggest that people exhibiting different activity-travel behavior patterns also express distinct attitudes towards the uses of AV (e.g., commuters perceive higher utility of AVs).