Steering Autonomous Vehicles Toward Equity

The US transportation system is characterized by inequitable access to opportunity, leading to lower levels of economic and physical mobility for people of color and families with low incomes. The introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) could redress or exacerbate these inequities, depending on how they are rolled out and what policies are implemented to regulate them. In this report, we explore one aspect of how ride-hailed AVs might affect equity. Specifically, we model how ride-hailed AV services could affect access to jobs and public amenities compared with privately owned human-driven vehicles, human-driven ride-hailed vehicles, and existing public transit services in two major cities: Atlanta and Los Angeles. We investigate how results vary based on estimated transportation service costs, the spending power of potential riders, the distribution of jobs, and neighborhood location. Our analysis also looked at other influencing factors, such as possible negative bias of human ride-hail drivers toward Black people. We find that, under most scenarios and comparisons, AV ride-hailing services can meaningfully increase access to jobs and public amenities only if they offer fares at less than half the typical levels of current human-driven ride-hailing options—rates that are also much cheaper than current ride-hailed AV fares. And this increased access is unlikely to be affordable to people with low incomes, even under the most optimistic pricing scenarios.