Is the future of urban mobility shared? : modeling ride-hailing adoption and preferences for ownership and sharing of autonomous vehicles

Society is experiencing the initial stages of a technological revolution that promises to disrupt urban transportation as known today and induce behavioral and social changes. The main factors guiding the transformation of urban mobility are the growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-enabled transportation services and the development of autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies. While the use of ICTs and vehicular automation are expected to provide direct road capacity improvements due to the real-time provision of traffic information, crash reductions, and platooning capabilities, these gains may be offset by latent demand effects. That is, the increase in level of service may actually result in the generation of more trips and escalation of vehicle miles traveled. In this sense, proactive planning and policy guided towards promoting the use of shared vehicles and pooled rides are important to minimize possible negative externalities of automation. The current dissertation provides initial guidance to such planning by examining individuals’ preferences toward the adoption of current and future mobility services and technologies. A research framework containing four independent but related analysis components is developed to allow a comprehensive investigation of travelers’ characteristics and behaviors associated with ride-hailing use and preferences regarding AVs. Empirical analyses are conducted using advanced econometric techniques applied to different types of data from three different cities. The results of the empirical analyses are compared and implications to transportation planning and policy are discussed. The results from the analyses undertaken in the dissertation show that, from a behavioral perspective, a service-based transportation future where people predominantly travel using shared vehicles and pooled rides instead of their own vehicles is on its way but still distant. A complex combination of actions is required to promote the use of shared services both today and in an AV future. Among these actions, we identify the need for campaigns to (a) increase technology awareness among older individuals and individuals from lower income households, and (b) reduce privacy-sensitivity among non-Hispanic Whites and millennials. Such efforts should also be complemented by a decrease in service fares and urban densification. The results also suggest the need to promote policies and integrated multi-modal systems that discourage individuals from substituting the use of active and public transit modes by ride-hailing and AV-based services. Finally, we observe that individuals seem to be less sensitive to the presence of strangers in a commute trip than in a leisure trip, but the sensitivity to time is the opposite. The implications of these results are that pooled services may have a large market penetration potential for commute trips as long as operated efficiently with minimal detour and pick-up/drop-off delays.Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin