Abstract

At the current time, road agencies and city authorities are considering various stimuli (legislations, policies, programs, and infrastructure investment projects) to support or facilitate electric, connected, and/or automation vehicle (ECAV) transportation. A candid and comprehensive assessment of such stimuli is possible only after due consideration of not only the benefits but also costs of each alternative option to each stakeholder. The road user, one of the key stakeholders of any stimulus, refers to an individual vehicle owner, user of a shared vehicle service, or commercial vehicle fleet owner. This report first presents a general evaluation framework that considers road user perspectives as an input. This framework could be used for ECAV-related appraisals of project investments, programs, and policies where it is sought to consider the user impacts of these stimuli in terms of the user costs or user benefits (reductions in user costs). Then the report presents the various ways in which road users are classified currently and argues for the modification of this traditional vehicle classification scheme to include subclasses to reflect the vehicle emerging technologies. Further, the report identifies the various categories of road user costs in the ECAV era. Further, the report provides data on road user cost values (direct costs only) in the traditional and the emerging era of ECAV transportation, to serve as inputs to such appraisals and evaluations. The use of reliable road-user cost data in stimulus-impact analysis facilitates the Infrastructure Owner and/or Operator (IOO)’s assessment of the systemwide benefits and costs incurred by all road-use stakeholders of the stimulus. In addition, such analysis helps the road users, including the ECAV fleet owner and the individual traveler, to measure the costs and benefits associated with their ECAV ownership and operations compared to other modes.

Date

9-2023

DOI

10.5703/1288284317742

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