Conference Abstract: Assessing the Behavioral Intention to Ride in Autonomous and Shared Autonomous Vehicles and Market Segmentation Analysis

This is an excerpt from an extended abstract submitted for a presentation given at the International Conference on Travel Behavior Research, held July 15-20, 2018, in Santa Barbara, California.  The presentation was given by Christos Gkartzonikas, based on his work on the CCAT project Behavioral Intention to Ride in an Autonomous Vehicle and Implications on Mode Choice Decisions, Energy Use, and Emissions.

Behavioral experiments assessing people's attitudes on autonomous vehicles (AVs) and shared AVs (SAVs) can help enhance our understanding towards the growing trend of urbanism and on the potential impacts on travel demand and patterns.  This study develops a theoretical model to assess the behavioral intention to ride in AVs/SAVs by investigating people's attitudes towards AVs/SAVs using behavioral experiments.  A market segmentation analysis follows that classifies respondents into distinct market segments with different characteristics and different levels of adoption.  The implemented theoretical model can be replicated and the developed survey instrument could be disseminated in other urban areas to compare the findings on AV/SAV adoption.  The results could answer key questions on the value proposition, market adoption on AVs/SAVs and characteristics of distinct market segments; thereby providing a deployment pathway for AVs/SAVs adoption. Additionally, the results could be useful to ride-sharing services for marketing and pricing-scheme decisions, to public transportation planning agencies for policy-making decisions, and to transportation planners for provisions in infrastructure due to the emergence of AVs.