A preliminary study of the potential impact of autonomous vehicles on residential location in Rome

Fully Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) can self-drive in all situations, offering the highest comfort to drivers, who can pursue several activities during their trips. Under this assumption, AVs will probably affect the perception of time and its value. The research presented in this paper is a first attempt to understand if the introduction of fully AVs may generate residential relocation from the city center to the suburbs due to a different time perception. Using Stated Preferences (SP) survey technique, discrete choice modelling, and traffic simulation, the effect of urban sprawl of AV-cities on the road network in terms of congestion was evaluated. The relocated demand, estimated thorough ad hoc calibrated behavioral models, was assigned to the road network of the city of Rome (Italy). Results show an increase in travel times (about 12%) for suburban residents commuting to work in city center due to the extra-demand relocated. Instead, intra-urban road congestion would benefit from lower traffic volumes (about −10% in travel times). Moreover, this work shows the positive impact of the ride-sharing schemes with AVs by simulating different penetration rates. These results, however, should be taken with caution, as the sample is very small, travel time and travel monetary costs are ignored, as are housing costs, and mode choice and residential location are not modelled simultaneously.