Self-driving vehicles’ impacts on Americans’ long-distance domestic travel choices

This research estimated models for long-distance domestic passenger trips before and after the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) and their application to a 10% synthetic US population. The authors synthesized 12.1M households and 28.1M individuals across 73,056 US census tracts. To generate disaggregated passenger trips, travel demand models, including trip frequency, season, purpose, party size, mode choice, and destination choice, and vehicle ownership models were estimated. Different datasets, including a 2021 long-distance AV survey, 2016/17 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) survey, EPA Smart Location data, and FHWA rJourney dataset were used for model estimation. The model applications indicated AV ownership to be 0.33 per capita after the introduction of AVs within the marketplace with a $3500 AV technology cost premium in the year 2040. Total person-miles traveled per capita in long-distance trips was also estimated to rise 35% (from 280 to 379 miles per month).