Here is a compilation of the summary paragraphs that precede each Chapter in our 2018 book The End of Driving: Transportation systems and public policy planning for autonomous vehicles (Elsevier). If you would like a particular chapter for your research please visit ResearchGate.net.

INTRODUCTION

This book is concerned with the intersection of vehicle automation, public policy, and society. It is about the diffusion, use, and outcomes of automated vehicles, rather than about their technology. We consider diffusion modeling as a way to segment the adoption of vehicle automation into phases that can be understood and planned for. The outcomes it focuses on encompass social, urban, and environmental justice.

CHAPTER 1. Critical Terminology and System Views Summary

There are many instances of careless terminology usage and confusing descriptions of vehicle automation. While there is no standard or best way to describe this technology, this chapter provides one consistent interpretation of several commonly used terms and expands the scope of meaning of vehicle automation mobility beyond the immediate technology of the vehicle into the contextual systems in which such robotic machines would operate. This is done so that the remainder of the book communicates its ideas more clearly.

CHAPTER 2. Three Planning Contexts: Hype, Diffusion, and Governance

This chapter looks at three issues. It explores the contextual high degree of hype and paucity of clarity regarding the timing, nature, and use of automated vehicles. Second, it presents a diffusion model intended to help planners focus on, proceed with, and measure staged deployment rather than waiting for technology promoters to decide the matter. Lastly, it introduces a management system model—elaborated in Chapters 12 and 13—that enables a jurisdiction to influence environmental and social justice impacts of massive fleets of autonomous, competing, for-hire vehicles. The purpose of this latter system is to retain public transit’s critical service governance roles of ensuring optimization and social inclusion.

PART 1: CONTEXT

CHAPTER 3. A Broad Context: The Contention of Change

Change is always difficult. In the case of vehicle automation, complex interactions among traveler habits and preferences, built infrastructure, land use, technical and social uncertainty, hype, fears, money, social equity, and many other factors promise to make the change from non-automation to automation difficult. Societal transitions from Market 1 [buying cars] to Market 2 [buying rides] will be far more difficult. In this chapter we describe the many barriers or at least influences on change related to new mobility. These factors interact with each other in ways that cannot be easily understood, and this makes modeling and planning especially complex. They play a contextual role in all the other chapters of this book.

CHAPTER 4. Conflicting Narratives: Shared Understanding Will Be Difficult to Achieve

Projections and expectations for vehicle automation and its effects are highly variable, with considerable uncertainty about its outcomes. Some hope for a new, safe mobility utopia; others fear a dystopia with new levels of congestion, sprawl and reduced social equity. The intention of this chapter is to illustrate that there is no uniform shared view of vehicle automation. Because this book is vectored toward a solution that provides for an optimal balance among numerous suboptimal preferences and needs (see Chapter 12), read this present chapter as both a “state of the union” for collective opinions relative to vehicle automation and as the cacophonous context against which regions and governments will consider future solutions.

PART 2 PROBLEM

CHAPTER 5. A Challenging Transition: Two Competing Markets

There have long been two fundamental choices for a person engaging in motorized travel: use a personally owned vehicle vs a vehicle for which one pays to ride. For most people in the developed world, this means a personal household car vs all the other modes. However, as a transportation medium, the private car is in a social and psychological class by itself, and this fact will be fundamental to the way in which automated vehicles will diffuse—i.e., will they be owned or shared? This chapter examines the factors that will have people adopt or avoid automation as well as what will make people prefer to own a vehicle or hire a ride.

CHAPTER 6. Transitioning Through Multiple Automated Forms

Urban and suburban populations will respond to changes in automated vehicle markets in a variety of ways, some of which are predictable. Human, social, and infrastructural factors are poised to inhibit rapid adoption of full automation and especially the switch from private ownership to multiple shared forms of transportation-on-demand. For several reasons, personal and household ownership of automated vehicles will peak long before the use of shared, automated fleets.

CHAPTER 7. How Privately Owned Vehicles Could Dominate the Next 30 Years

No matter how much it is hoped or expected that motor vehicle ownership will begin to decline, markets are known to follow consumer adoption rules that must be respected. Using a market dissemination model called ECAN, this chapter explores the mechanisms that will likely make the existing Market 1 preference for household vehicle ownership transfer to the conditionally automated vehicle and continue to lock in the majority preference for household ownership of personal vehicles during the Early and Rising AV-Eras. In other words, this is a market model that predicts the continuity of Market 1 which will promote sprawl and sustain parking demand, and the inhibited expansion of Market 2, which will tend to constrain it to current Market 2 users, i.e. transit and taxi users.

CHAPTER 8. A Note About Congestion

Vehicle automation elicits several major hopes. One is that this technology will reduce traffic congestion in urban regional road transportation networks. This short chapter explores a bit about congestion, its causes, its measurement, and why its solution has eluded us and may continue to do so.

PART 3 SOLUTIONS

CHAPTER 9. Barriers to Shared Use of Vehicles

A second major hope elicited by driverless-vehicle technology is that when cars become completely automated “no one will want to own a car.” It may be reasonable to expect a relative decline in per-capita ownership, but as of 2018, there continues to be an absolute increase in total ownership. In Canada, for example, a decline in absolute ownership is not evident through 2017 and any relative slowing in per-capita ownership is masked by population growth. Since urban space is constrained, an absolute increase—which many mobility optimists ignore—tends to overwhelm any relative decline that may occur. That private ownership will cease or become rare is wishful thinking—at least for the next half-century and for any country whose government will not ban ownership.

CHAPTER 10. Transit Leap in Theory

None of the vehicle automation technology, its infrastructural context, or current traveler preferences is ready for a rapid or traffic-changing migration from the dominance of the household vehicle (Market 1) to a majority of trips in shared public-service vehicles (Market 2). In recognition of this, this chapter describes a staged approach to the introduction of driverless passenger systems into public transit applications. The stages proposed must be ordered in ways that have early participation in applications that are currently underserved—first or last kilometer in low-density environments—and gradually expanded and linked into growing service areas until entire regions comprising multiple cities and towns are linked in a fully automated and optimized service spectrum designed to carry a majority of passenger trips in the region. This is a multi-decade process.

CHAPTER 11. Transit Leap in Practice: City of SeaTac

City of SeaTac, Washington, in 2017 engaged an automated vehicles consultancy (AVC) to explore automated vehicle applications deployment for community benefit, with a wide scope of possibilities left open for study. After examining trip patterns and geography, the AVC determined that a pilot project amounting to transit leap with available vehicles from the existing automated shuttle industry deployed in one residential section of the municipality would provide opportunities to serve multiple markets. At the same time, a program and economic pattern for wider, multi-city deployment in the near future would be established.

CHAPTER 12. Governing Fleets of Automated Vehicles

Expanding vehicle automation will disrupt the current business models supporting private vehicle ownership and the employment of paid drivers by both private and public passenger transport organizations. It will also disrupt how governments now manage urban transportation. Before the introduction of smartphone ride-hailing, municipal governments managed taxi systems with constraints on vehicle supply by way of restrictions on the number of medallions issued that every taxicab required. Until the establishment of digital systems management of Market 2 shared-vehicle fleets, government will continue to manage public transit with subsidies, large vehicles, fixed routes, and rigid schedules—all holdovers from the 20th century. Profit-seeking, digitally enabled business processes for managing private ridesharing fleets create an additional threat to the underperforming social equity and congestion management purposes of government by challenging public transit. This chapter describes a governance approach to enhancing governments’ responsible management of transportation in the new digital age.

CHAPTER 13. Harmonizing Competitive Fleets of Automated Common Carriers

The previous chapter proposed a shift from managing public transit via acquisition and operation of municipal fleets of agency-owned vehicles to the specification and regulation of the behavior of fleets of driverless robotic taxis and microtransit vehicles. These future fleets would be potentially massive, operated by multiple vendors. This chapter provides a high-level overview of the implementation of a fleet harmonization system encompassing data capture, aggregation, analytics, and reporting to equip municipal and regional authorities to manage both transportation supply and transportation demand using digital governance methods and technologies. While facilitating fair competition between the private sector vendors of mobility as a service, the harmonization system motivates the emergent, collective decision-making of competitive commercial fleet operators toward higher overall efficiency and lower congestion impact on public roads, as well as enabling an improved level of social equity across all of the trip-making regional population that these fleets serve.

CHAPTER 14: The End of Driving and Transit- Oriented Development

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is an appealing urbanist idea that has so far delivered important livability and walkable access to some transit stations in urban neighborhoods along particular corridors. However, in North America, the concept has generally failed at the metropolitan regional level to significantly constrain single occupant vehicle driving and boost transit system ridership. Until now, TOD has also failed to provide a pathway to affordable housing. This chapter presents two proposals that leverage automated Market 2 transportation systems to address TOD effectiveness over the upcoming decades. The first leverages Transit Leap 2 (see Chapter 10) to increase the operational radius of the traditional TOD location; the second leverages Transit Leap 3 to enable the deployment of many more, highly desirable, TOD-equivalent locations without the requirement for heavy, fixed- guideway transit.

CHAPTER 15: How Behavioral Economics Can Help

There are many reasons that a majority of travelers prefer to travel in a personal automobile, are unwilling to travel with strangers, may overvalue status vehicles, or are reluctant to change and try something new. There are also many ways to entice people to consider a new idea or approach. This chapter explores human behavioral aspects that has people change—or not. If we are going to shift from a majority of trips taken in Market 1 vehicles to a majority of trips in Market 2 vehicles, a solid understanding and creative application of behavioral economics principles will be valuable. While research in behavioral economics and social psychology has revealed deep and consistent biases that can lead to suboptimal choices, it has also uncovered ways to potentially overcome these mental limitations. By constructing choices and framing new mobility options in ways that encourage adoption, companies, governments, nonprofits, and others can help ensure that the future of mobility arrives sooner rather than later.

Final Paragraph (from Conclusion)

We assert a need to create managed transportation systems—vehicles, fleets, regulations, marketing, economics, and behavioral economics—that gradually reveal themselves as an improvement over ownership rather than an imposed denial of privilege. It may be appealing to argue that “no one would sensibly own a vehicle,” but we insist that such an argument is not evidence-based and that no one has illustrated how to make that happen in reality and in a significant way. But we believe that the relative scale of vehicle ownership can be shifted between now and mid-century with a patient vision and a shared understanding of the tools we have described.