Impact of Autonomous Vehicles in Cities: User Perception

Abstract

Autonomous driving is a very important topic aiming on changing mobility in smart cities. A lot of research has been dedicated to development of vehicles without drivers and quite many tests and real world demonstrations have been reported especially in the last years. The first expectations were very optimistic. Researchers as well as general public expected high positive influence in the congestions, travel time and other mobility aspects. However, the latest research questions these purely positive expectations and suggest that autonomous driving might have positive or negative effect based on city policies in place.In order to gain a better understanding about the current expectations of general public about the impact of autonomous driving, a survey has been conducted as part of a European project MAVEN. This paper provides a short description of the survey design and then summarizes the main findings and results of this survey. The results can get us a better way to understand the feeling of citizens about autonomous vehicles and the transition to full automated cities.The results confirmed the general trends and at the same time gave us more insight into the special questions related to MAVEN use cases. These findings will be further validated in simulation experiments.