Potential Effects of Automated Vehicles on Road Transportation: A Literature Review

Automated vehicles (AVs) are one of the emerging technologies that can perform the driving task themselves. The market penetration of AVs is expected to get growth in the close future. Therefore, it is crucial to have an overall clue on how they play the role in the road transportation sector. Automation might be assumed to have a beneficial impact on many aspects related to road transportation. The current paper attempts to investigate this rough assumption by reviewing the literature on the potential effects of automated vehicles on road transportation. A comprehensive look at the overall potential effects of automated vehicles will show the entire picture, and not just a cropped portion of that, to the researchers, decision makers, and practitioners and helps them to identify the negative and positive effects as well as challenges and uncertainties towards this new technology. In this paper, literature findings on the potential effects of automated vehicles on traffic flow, pedestrians mobility, travel demand and travel pattern, safety and security, and energy consumption and emissions are reviewed and discussed. According to the literature, it is concluded that AVs, as their market penetration increases, promisingly improve the capacity of a road network, eliminates human driver errors, and provide better mobility for groups of people who are currently facing travel-restriction conditions. However, the long-term effects of AVs especially on energy consumption, emission, pedestrian interaction, safety and security has uncertainty due to the complexity of predicting the future mobility pattern.