Exploring the Economic, Environmental, and Travel Implications of Changes in Parking Choices due to Driverless Vehicles: An Agent-Based Simulation Approach

Abstract

Fully driverless automated vehicles (AVs) could considerably alter the proximity value of parking, due to an AV's ability to drop passengers off at their destination, search for cheaper parking, and return to pick up their occupants when needed. This study estimates the potential impact of privately-owned driverless vehicles on vehicle miles traveled (VMT), energy use, emissions, parking revenue, and daily parking cost savings in the city of Seattle, Washington from changes in parking decisions using an agent-based simulation model. Each AV is assumed to consider the cost to drive to each parking spot, the associated daily parking cost, and the parking availability at each location, and the AV ranks each choice in terms of economic cost. The simulation results indicate at the low penetration rates (5 to 25 percent AV penetration) AVs in downtown Seattle would travel an additional 3.5-4.0 miles per day on average, and high penetration rates (50 to 100 percent AV penetration) would travel an additional 5.6-8.4 miles per day on average. The results also suggest that as AV penetration rates increase, parking lot revenues decrease significantly and could likely decline to the point where operating a lot is unsustainable economically, if no parking demand management policies are implemented. This could lead to changes in land use as the amount of parking needed in urban areas is reduced and cars move away from the downtown area for cheaper parking. This analysis provides an illustration of the first-order effects of AVs on the built environment and could help inform near and long-term policy and infrastructure decisions during the transition to automation.

Internet of Things: Energy boon or bane?

“…In the case of energy efficiency, the rebound effect has been found to reduce (but not eliminate) the expected benefits of efficiency interventions (12). For example, research on autonomous vehicles, which are part of the IoT, suggest that these vehicles could lead to greater fuel use through increased total miles of travel as well as increased travel by currently underserved communities (13,14). For an average U.S. household, direct energy use of consumer electronics tripled between 1992 and 2007, from 4800 to 15,300 MJ per year per household (6).…”

Agent-Based Simulation of Autonomous Vehicles: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The replacement rate of car trips by AT mode varied from 0% to 100% with corresponding fleet size variations was examined in [19]. Harper et al [11] examined different AV penetration ranging from 5% to 100% in downtown Seattle to explore the various outputs of the simulation. Javanshour et al [24] investigated the performance of the AMOD system under demand uncertainty (2%-20% market penetration).…”

High-Resolution Traffic Sensing with Probe Autonomous Vehicles: A Data-Driven Approach

“…As the combination of a wide spectrum of cutting-edge technologies, autonomous vehicles (AVs) are destined to fundamentally change and reform the whole mobility system [ 1 ]. AVs have great potentials in improving safety and mobility [ 2 , 3 , 4 ], reducing fuel consumption and emission [ 5 , 6 ], and redefining civil infrastructure systems, such as road networks [ 7 , 8 , 9 ], parking spaces [ 10 , 11 , 12 ], and public transit systems [ 13 , 14 ]. Over the past two decades, many advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) (e.g., lane keeping, adaptive cruise control) have been deployed in various types of production vehicles.…”