A growing literature suggests that widespread travel conducted through driverless
connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) accessed as a service, in contrast to those personally
owned, could have significant impacts on the sustainability of urban transportation. However, it is
unclear how the general public currently considers willingness to travel in driverless vehicles, and
if they would be more comfortable doing so in one personally owned or one accessed as a service.
To address this, we collected travel survey data by intercepting respondents on discretionary or social
trips to four popular destinations in a medium-size U.S. city in the spring of 2017. After collecting
data on how the respondent reached the survey site and the trip’s origin and destination, survey
administrators then asked if respondents would have been willing to make their current trip in either a
personally-owned driverless vehicle or through a driverless vehicle service. Over one-third expressed
willingness to use both forms, while 31% were unwilling to use either. For those that considered only
one, slightly more favored the personally-owned model. Consideration of an existing mobility service
was consistently a positive and significant predictor of those that expressed willingness to travel in a
driverless vehicle, while traveling downtown negatively and significantly influenced consideration
of at least one form of driverless vehicle. These findings highlight the diverse public views about the
prospect of integration of CAVs in transportation systems and raise questions about the assumption
that travelers to central city locations would be early adopters of automated vehicle mobility services.The research reported here was supported in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), SPEED Program Grant No. 83594901the University of Michigan Energy Institute (UMEI) and University of Michigan Dow Sustainability Fellows progra
