(air whooshing)
- [Narrator] Demand for autonomous vehicles
that travel long distances
will continue to rise in the coming years.
Research models that include these vehicles
will be necessary to help with traffic management.
Researchers from the Texas Department of Transportation
and the Center for Transportation Research
aim to place all information related to passenger
and freight-based travel into a user-friendly form,
accessible to TexDOT employees.
- Well, the need for this research arose
due to potential impacts of autonomous vehicles
on long distance travel.
Specifically, the researchers wanted to understand
how these vehicles would affect
passenger and freight travel in Texas.
The researchers wanted to see if people
might take longer trips by car instead of flying,
and how trucks might deliver goods more efficiently.
- Well, autonomous vehicles, or self-driving vehicles,
are coming to Texas and the world.
And you already see them here in Austin.
You've seen them in Dallas and Houston.
We have trucks driving between some of these big cities
each day without somebody touching that wheel
or hitting those brakes and gas pedals.
And to anticipate the impacts on traffic
across the state, we really needed to update our models.
And especially that statewide analysis model.
- [Narrator] The research has built a computer model
of the United States transportation system
way out in the year 2040.
And they were pretending that there were self-driving cars
and trucks on the road.
And they used data from surveys, government statistics,
and traffic patterns to make their model
as realistic as possible.
And the key finding is that autonomous vehicles
are predicted to increase what are called
person miles for existing long distance trips by about 35%.
And truck share is also expected to increase
with about a 6% increase in what are called
ton-miles transported by truck.
- What's really important, that we foresee the future
before we make transportation investments
or big policy changes.
The added travel,
especially on the passenger side is dramatic.
And will congest, and probably gridlock
much of the state's system without having road pricing.
Now with the smart technologies for communications
and onboard dongles that retain all the information
about how much the vehicle owes, we can really
start to deploy those,
and start making the management of this vast system
much better, which will be really, ultimately much better
for all of the travelers because it'll be
a much more rational delivery of transportation services.
And these kinds of models allow us to see 10, 20, 30 years
in the future when the fleet has really evolved
to much more, let's say, electric vehicles,
and self-driving vehicles, and shared fleets,
and self-driving buses.
All these kinds of technologies,
we know that they're coming.
They're already here to some extent.
And we need to make better long-term investment
and policy decisions now.
- This helps Texas prepare
for the future of transportation by understanding
how travel might change.
TexDOT could plan for things like road maintenance,
traffic flow, and even air quality.
So this could mean smoother journeys
and cleaner air for everyone.
So having really good authoritative research
that puts a number to some of these things
really helps us remove some of that uncertainty,
and allows us to plan for the future now.
And execute with more certainty.
Pass on that value to Texans.
And for the public, that could mean huge benefits
to travel time and safety,
and the value of their tax dollars.
- [Narrator] For more information,
and to find the publication for this project,
please visit the TexDOT Research Library
at the link shown below.