01697282

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Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have no need to park close to their destination, or even to park at all. Instead, AVs can seek out free on-street parking, return home, or cruise (circle around). Because cruising is less costly at lower speeds, AVs also have the incentive to implicitly coordinate with each other in order to generate congestion. Using a traffic microsimulation model and data from San Francisco, this paper suggests that AVs could more than double vehicle trips to, from and within downtown areas. New vehicle trips are generated by a ~90% reduction in effective parking costs, while existing trips become longer because of driving to more distant parking spaces and cruising. One potential policy response—subsidized peripheral parking—would exacerbate congestion through further reducing the cost of driving. Instead, this paper argues that AVs provide the opportunity and the imperative to implement congestion pricing.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE50 Standing Committee on Transportation Demand Management.

19-00414

English

4p

2019

Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References

Central business districts; Congestion pricing; Intelligent vehicles; Parking; Policy; Traffic congestion; Traffic simulation; Trip generation

San Francisco (California)

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Policy; Vehicles and Equipment

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2019 Paper #19-00414

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 7 2018 9:22AM