Citation

Das S. Transp. Res. F Traffic Psychol. Behav. 2021; 81: 41-54.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.trf.2021.04.018

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies have been rapidly advancing. One benefit of AVs is that the technology could eliminate many driver errors and also mitigate many pedestrian and bicyclist collisions. Real-world AVs have been tested in many cities. Five companies are running around 50 AVs in Pittsburgh, following the autonomous testing guidelines. BikePGH, a non-profit organization located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania conducted a follow-up survey in 2019 (the first survey was conducted in 2017) to understand non-motorists' opinions of AVs. This study examined how pedestrians and bicyclists perceived AV safety based on their understanding and experiences. At first, this study performed a comparison group test to determine which questions vary by participants' AV safety rating. The responses were later analyzed with a data mining method known as 'association rules mining.' A new performance measure, known as the rule power factor, was then used to identify the significant patterns in the form of rules. The participants also provided their thoughts in responses to the open-ended questions. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling algorithm, 40 topic models were developed based on five open-ended questions. The findings show that the non-motorists showed comparatively fewer negative opinions towards AVs than positive assessments. The results also show that perception patterns vary by the participant's rating on AV safety.

FINDINGS of this study would be beneficial for the AV stakeholders in making AVs and roadways safer for non-motorists.

Language: en

Keywords

Association rules mining; Autonomous vehicles; Bicyclists; Pedestrians; Perception; Topic modeling