Design and Simulation of a Public-Transportation-Complimentary Autonomous Commuter Shuttle

Job opportunities affect the attractiveness of cities significantly. Since finding a place to live near the workplace is difficult in a lot of cases, many people have to commute by car or public transport. Especially commutes by private vehicle cause congestion, emissions and parking pressure. This work aims to design a shuttle service for employees of a large company living in areas with bad public transportation connections to the workplace. In order to compliment public transport, the shuttle service only operates in these areas and offers a new alternative to commuting by private vehicle. The key of any mobility service is to build a very convenient system with short door-to-door journey times and low prices. The illustrated system design respects the flexible working hours of the single commuters. Using commuter data of a research and development center, we design a realistic scenario for a large company in Munich taking the following approach: first, we identify areas where commuters are unlikely to use public transport, then a user-friendly shuttle service is designed and tested via simulations. The shuttle service will offer low journey times, as well as prices in the range of public transportation and private vehicles (operating costs), if the shuttles drive autonomously. Since it is an open question, when autonomous shuttles will be able to drive in mixed traffic, we also evaluate the costs of the proposed shuttle system with drivers. We find that without subsidies, labor costs for drivers increase the shuttle costs to a noncompetitive level.