- [Narrator] Automated and connected vehicle technology
is fast becoming an integral part
of our transportation environment.
And even though we may still be years away
from fully self-driving vehicles, what will the impact be
on our roadways once cars
and trucks can drive themselves on long trips
with low effort from the passengers inside them?
What does this mean
for freight movement and what happens to air travel?
The Center for Transportation Research at the University
of Texas at Austin recently tackled questions
like these in a Texas Department
of Transportation Research project that looked at the future
of long distance travel in Texas and the nation.
- So we recognize that autonomous vehicles are coming
and that's gonna change the way that we plan
for transportation in this state.
And so from that, we needed research to understand
particularly for movement
between cities and rural communities
and some of those longer haul roads that TexDOT maintains
how transportation might change.
- TexDOT and other agencies need to have assets
and investments on the ground in time
for those big influxes of new transportation modes.
Otherwise, we risk a lot of issues
safety issues, congestion issues, emissions issues.
So this project was designed
to look at the future of long distance travel
across the state of Texas and the entire nation
due to autonomous vehicles making driving easier
whether it's trucks or its passenger vehicles.
- [James] The key takeaways from the research was that
possibly air travel would shift away from shorter flights
to longer flights with vehicular travel making
up the difference.
Long distance autonomous trucking
will become more competitive with rail.
And AVs may induce some populations
to pick further travel destinations
than they normally would.
- [Kara] It ends up creating, you know,
more ground transportation
more vehicle miles traveled on the Texas network.
And that's a big takeaway as well as certain ports
having more or less, you know, traffic from freight
of different commodity types.
So we're also tracking each commodity type.
I think that this continues to build the case
of the importance of highways
and major road systems between major urban areas,
commercial areas, and rural areas.
We see that traffic is just gonna continue
to go up as more technologies introduced
into the transportation system.
- But if you look at all trips
across all distance categories
then you do expect maybe 25 to 50% more vehicle
miles traveled.
And so you really need something like policies
to help manage demand and keep things flowing.
- TexDOT is going to conduct another phase
of research focused even more on autonomous
freight movement in the state.
And all of this should be combined to help our
planners understand how freight is gonna move in the future.
- [Narrator] For more information
and to find the publication for this project,
please visit the TexDOT research library
at the link shown below.