[NOT] something always happening in the next 20 years

As autonomous vehicles (AVs) have driven more than 44 million miles on U.S. public roads, we are at an exciting juncture where commercialized AV services have evolved from pilot projects into fully operational businesses. Waymo, a major AV service provider owned by Google, has rapidly expanded the scope of its 24/7 AV services in Phoenix and San Francisco recently. For decades, research into the potential benefits and challenges of integrating AVs into the built environment has primarily relied on computational simulations, often built upon assumed parameters like inter-arrival time, dwell time, and idling time. The maturity of commercial AV services offers the first real opportunity to assess the real-world impacts of AVs and to validate the key parameters used in simulation models.

This project is supported by the William Emerson Travel Grant from the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning