ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- If one of the more beneficial aspects of futuristic, “driverless” cars were safer roads, a more profitable ramification for convenience-store retailers may be increased traffic—an 11% bump, according to a recently released study.
Coming from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Institute in Ann Arbor, the study calculated the number of new people such cars would bring to the road, based on eliminating the need for a driver’s license.
Explaining their findings, the report’s authors, Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, said their methodology involved identifying reasons why people don’t have licenses that would evaporate with self-driving vehicles. From there, they calculated the new percentage of persons who would have access to such transportation. Finally, they took that expanded pool of those eligible to use driverless transportation to calculate the new amount of travel, as well as the new distribution of trip lengths.
The report also found that a surprising number of young people today don’t have driver’s licenses. In 1983, 84% of 18-to-19-year-olds held a license. Thirty years later, in 2013, that number had dropped to 66%. The authors conducted a survey in 2014 to find out why, and found the following reasons:
- Too busy or not enough time to get a driver’s license.
- Owning and maintaining a vehicle is too expensive.
- Able to get transportation from others.
- Prefer to bike or walk.
- Prefer to use public transportation.
- Disability/medical/vision problem.
- Never learned or still learning to drive.
- Able to communicate and/or conduct business online instead.
- Concerned about how driving impacts the environment.
- Do not like to drive/afraid to drive.
- Legal issue.
Some of these reasons, like preferring to go by bike or concern about the environment, are unlikely to be affected by the opportunity to use a driverless car. But other reasons become moot if the need for a license is removed entirely—too busy, medical condition and so on. The study estimates how many extra people would take to the road and finds that, across the full age range of 18-to-39-year-olds, 50% of those reasons evaporate.
Using statistics, the authors calculated the likely increase in miles driven thanks to autonomous cars. The overall increase is 11%, but more surprising was how much more kids will use cars in the future--miles driven by 18-to-19-year-olds jumps 28% in a driverless future.
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