Effects of Driverless Vehicles on Competitiveness of Bus Transit Services

The advent of driverless vehicles, including automobiles and buses, may considerably affect the competitiveness and ridership of public transportation services in negative as well as positive ways. Since driverless vehicles may be widely used in the fairly near future, public transit operators and transportation planners should prepare to deal with their anticipated effects. In this paper, (1) we formulate modular optimization models for both human-driven and automated bus services with fixed routes as well as flexible routes. These models are solved analytically. Their results can be used to abstract the essential characteristics of the transportation system and analyze system behavior. (2) We develop preliminary quantitative assessments of those effects, showing that without drivers, the introduction of automated vehicles can reduce the competitiveness of bus transit. (3) We conduct sensitivity analyses to explore how changes in input parameters affect the results. (4) We identify insights that may help prepare transit operators, transportation planners, and other transportation system stakeholders for effectively adapting to the introduction of driverless vehicles.