Male lone wolves and sociable females – Preferences for shared and AV transport services

This paper examines preferences for future transports, focusing specifically on shared transports and autonomous vehicles, in a national context. A choice experiment approach is applied in which respondents are asked to choose between individual and shared transport services, each associated with different attribute levels (driver/autonomous, waiting and travel times, and costs) for a trip to go grocery shopping. Data are analysed by applying latent class modelling, which facilitates the analysis of heterogeneity in preferences for the attributes across different groups in the sample. The results reveal three groups with considerable heterogeneity in preferences: the group accepting trade-offs, the lone-wolves, and the sociable. The trade-off group do not want to share transport, but are positive towards autonomous vehicles, and make trade-offs between these characteristics and costs. The members in the lone-wolves group are only concerned about not travelling in a shared transport. Members in the smallest sociable group are positive about sharing transports but reject autonomous vehicles. Women are overrepresented in the sociable group, as are people with environmental concern and those who lack a driver's licence. Overall, we find that a majority of the sample does not want to share transport services, which potentially constitutes a major challenge for policy makers regarding reaching environmental transport policy goals.