Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour
A focus group study on the potential of autonomous vehicles as a viable transportation option: Perspectives from people with disabilities and public transit agencies
Introduction
Some people with disabilities have limited functional mobility and restricted transportation options. According to a 2002 national survey of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), the top two challenges people with disabilities had regarding transportation were having limited or no access to public transportation, and not having a personal vehicle (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2003). A 2017 survey of the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that about 25.5 million Americans aged 5 and older self-reported travel-limiting disabilities (Brumbaugh, 2018). The same survey reported that people with disabilities, regardless of age, made fewer trips and used personal vehicles less frequently than people without disabilities (Brumbaugh, 2018). These statistics illustrate mobility challenges that people with disabilities experience.
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) is a U.S. federal law prohibiting discrimination based on disability. The ADA mandates that all public entities operating a fixed-route transit system provide a complementary and comparable ADA paratransit, which generally operates door-to-door services responding to individual riders’ demands (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2012). The demands for paratransit services are expected to increase continuously as the population over 65 years will reach 20 percent of the nation’s population by 2030 (Kaufman, Smith, Connell, & Marulli, 2016). For transit agencies, the growth in paratransit demand is critical, given expensive operating costs (Balog, 1997, U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2012). Thus, developing transformative strategies to meet growing needs, while still maintaining financial sustainability, is a priority for governments, transit agencies, and researchers.
The emergence of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology is expected to bring significant changes to transportation modes worldwide. From 2012 to 2016, the CityMobil2 project demonstrated Automated Road Transport Systems using fully automated vehicles in several European cities (Community Research and Development Information Service, 2016). In the U.S., Google began a self-driving car project in 2009, and one person who was blind rode in a fully self-driving car on public roads in Austin, Texas in 2015. Tesla also advertised in 2016 that their passenger cars are capable of providing a “full self-driving” mode (The Tesla Team, 2016).
An important key to the success of AVs is user acceptance and insights (Axsen and Sovacool, 2019, Nordhoff et al., 2018). Although people with disabilities are expected to be some of the main beneficiaries, little is known about their thoughts regarding AVs, which could vary from existing studies addressing the general publics’ perceptions and acceptance of AVs. For example, many studies investigated preferences (e.g., willingness-to-pay) and concerns about AVs from the perspectives of drivers with a focus on a transfer of vehicle control to machines (Bansal and Kockelman, 2017, Haboucha et al., 2017, König and Neumayr, 2017, Kyriakidis et al., 2015, Liljamo et al., 2018); but people with disabilities might have different perceptions, needs, and concerns as a non-driver and as they have limited mobility options compared to people without disabilities. Moreover, the perspective of transit agencies, the most probable service providers of autonomous vehicle transportation (AVT) services, has also been overlooked.
Given the expected impacts of AVT on people with disabilities and transit systems, this study discusses mobility issues and challenges among people with disabilities and explores the potential of AVT to serve this population to improve mobility. This study focuses on people with visual impairments and people with physical disabilities (i.e., having severe difficulty walking or climbing stairs). According to recent research, when compared to other types of disabilities, these two groups have more barriers to using public transit services, such as difficulties in using mobility-aids (e.g., wheelchair or scooter), traveling with service animals, or receiving inadequate services from drivers (Bezyak, Sabella, & Gattis, 2017). In the following sections, previous studies related to mobility issues among people with disabilities and the potential impacts of AVs are reviewed, followed by the methodology and the findings of this study. The concluding remarks offer initial insights on shaping AVT strategies and policies relevant to improving mobility for those populations.
Section snippets
Mobility issues among people with disabilities
In urban transportation, mobility supports an individuals’ ability to carry out daily activities. However, people with disabilities often face obstacles that restrict their mobility (Stough & Mayhorn, 2013). Limited mobility can be a critical barrier to accessing health-care services, physical and social activities, and job opportunities (Blais and El-Geneidy, 2014, Bowe, 1979, Kim and Ulfarsson, 2013, Lubin and Deka, 2012, Montarzino et al., 2007). These obstacles may include physical and
Focus groups and content analysis
The aims of this study are to identify daily mobility issues that people with disabilities face and to explore how people with disabilities and how transit service experts perceive AVT. Several transportation researchers have used focus groups to collect such data (Clifton and Handy, 2003, Huth et al., 2014, Lubin and Feeley, 2016, Naznin et al., 2017). Focus groups are particularly useful for several reasons. First, discussions among participants often generate themes that the researcher has
Results
The focus groups provided valuable information about participants with disabilities’ travel patterns, mobility issues, and perceptions of AVT. This study reconfirmed the diverse travel needs of people with disabilities to do daily activities, such as attending work or school, participating in social or religious activities, shopping, eating out, and attending medical appointments. Most participants with disabilities relied on public transit services, including both paratransit and fixed-route
Discussion and conclusions
Our results reconfirm the mobility issues examined in previous studies and that people with disabilities enthusiastically expect AVs to improve their mobility. Also, the results show that transit service experts expressed their overall supportive views on the potential of AVT to improve people with disabilities’ mobility. Such expectations are partly due to their hope to resolve lingering problems with public transit services. However, our findings also identify participants with disabilities’
Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Jinuk Hwang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft. Wei Li: Conceptualization, Validation, Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Laura Stough: Conceptualization, Validation, Writing - review & editing. Chanam Lee: Conceptualization, Validation, Writing - review & editing. Katherine Turnbull: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing.
Acknowledgements
This research is a part of the dissertation of Jinuk Hwang. The authors thank the participants of the focus groups. Special thanks to Martin Kareithi from the Austin Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Auturo Jackson from the Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Linda Cherrington, Todd Hansen, and James Cardenas from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, and Dr. Kayla Sweet from Texas A&M University for facilitating a series of focus groups.
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