Exploring the mobility and energy implications of shared versus private autonomous vehicles

The prevailing trend toward greater automation and connectivity requires modeling and analysis tools to explore connectivity, automation, decision science and other future mobility issues at multiple scales. This paper describes various modeling efforts in order to model the mobility and energy impact of autonomous and connected technologies; design of scenarios under different technological, behavioral, and socioeconomic assumptions; and finally, key findings from the scenario runs enabled by the advanced models developed. The integrated ABM-DTA software POLARIS has been extended to include transit, intra-household vehicle sharing, transportation network company (TNC) operations along with updates to the mesoscopic traffic models and value of time adjustments due to new technologies affecting the mode, destination, and route choice. The three scenarios are summarized as high sharing – low automation, high sharing – high automation, and low sharing – high automation, with VMT changes ranging from -13% to 42%.