Assessment of the Automated Vehicles Impacts on Urban Mobility

Project run by Mazdak Sadeghpour (PhD candidate) & Assoc.Prof.Eda Beyazit Ince
Funded by İTÜ BAP
 
With regard to the effects of automobiles’ arrival on the development of the cities and shaping the urban areas of the 20th century on the one hand, and the enormous investments of automakers and technology leading companies on vehicles automation technologies on the other hand, it is vital to be prepared for the emerging of Automated Vehicles (AVs) and their possible impacts on different aspects of our lives and cities before their widespread deployment. The provided convenience by AVs is expected to revolutionize peoples’ travel behaviors on their daily activities, car ownership patterns and decisions regarding their residency locations which even can affect the extension of cities towards the outer periphery along with many other fundamental changes in other aspects. All of the developed countries and also most of the developing ones have started to involve AVs on their short-, mid- and long-horizon urban mobility plans while there is almost no announced study or preparation regarded to AVs in the practical or academic levels in Turkey. Consequently, in order to fill this gap, this PhD dissertation has aimed to (i) analyze the current AVs’ scientific landscape in the local and global level in order to map the literature and specify the gaps in detail with deploying mega-data and utilizing statistical methods in a structured way, (ii) investigate the preferences and attitudes of the potential users and determine the latent factors which will affect the urban mobility,  adoption patterns of AVs and future travel behaviors under various scenarios, along with (iii) examine the affecting factors in the non-user aspects, particularly from experts’ viewpoint, in a holistic way.  For this purpose, “Scientometric & Bibliometric Analysis”, “Multinomial Logit Models” and “Multilevel Perspective Analysis” as well as other qualitative and quantitative methods in different phases of the study, with employing specific software tools will be deployed.