Public Acceptance Perspective of Autonomous Vehicles: Analytical Essay

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Fully automated driving can potentially provide enormous benefits to society. However, it has been unclear whether people will appreciate such far-reaching technology. As such, several studies have been carried out to investigate the public opinion about automated vehicles, in particular the user acceptance of fully automated vehicles. For example, (Bazilinskyy, Kyriakidis, & Winter, 2015) investigated anonymous textual comments regarding fully automated driving. They found that the public opinion appears to be split, with many respondents being positive and many respondents being negative towards fully automated driving. It is likely that early adopters of new technology belong to the group that responds positively to fully automated driving, although this was not explicitly addressed in this study. In another study on public opinion on automated driving (Kyriakidis, Happee, & Winter, 2015) found that one third (of the 5,000 respondents from 109 countries, 40 of which had at least 25 respondents) indicated that they considered automated driving highly enjoyable. On average, however, respondents considered manual driving the most enjoyable mode of driving. Also, they discovered that respondents were most concerned about software hacking, legal issues and safety on the adoption of Autonomous vehicles.

More so, According to the 2015 international survey conducted by the institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE) (Vissers et al., 2016) found that safety and faith in technology were priorities as the main barriers to users acceptance of AVs. They further indicated that participants of this study express uncomfortable attitude towards they use of AVs for children transportation. Similarly, (Schoettle & Sivak, 2014) survey studies conducted in the United states, the United Kingdom and Australia showed that 90% of the respondents had concerns that AVS would, in general, not drive and respond to dynamic situations as well as human drivers. They were particularly concerned about the possibility that automated vehicles could get confused in unexpected traffic situations. This concern about safety issues and automated vehicles not performing as well as manually driven vehicles was also found in another study of (Schoettle & Sivak 2014b), which included respondents from China, India and Japan. In their survey studies, Schoettle & Sivak also explicitly asked whether respondents were concerned about the interaction between pedestrians and cyclists with automated vehicles. In the English-speaking countries, many respondents indicated to be very concerned: 42.1% in the United States, 35.6% in Australia, and 33.4% in the United Kingdom. In the Asian countries, the Chinese appeared to be the most concerned (42.6% very concerned), followed by the Indian people (40.4%) and the Japanese (22.2%).

From the various studies above, it is seen that not all people consider the development and transition of AVs into the present mobility system desirable as many show concerns about their safety consequences. Moreover, it has been shown that peoples behaviour are influence by their attitude, and beliefs (Ajzen, 2011) as such lack of confidence in AVs will influence the behaviour of pedestrians and cyclist when they meet and may results to traffic crashes. So, if AVs need to be incorporated within the present mobility system, apart from technical feasibility, public acceptance needs to be taking into considerations as well.

Cyclists and pedestrians are classified as vulnerable or unprotected road users. Contrary to car occupants, pedestrians and cyclists do not have a protective ‘shell’ that reduces the impact in case of a collision or a fall. As a consequence, they have a high risk of getting seriously injured, in particular when colliding with much heavier vehicles, even at relatively low speeds(World Heath Organisation (WHO), 2018)

According to report (World Heath Organisation (WHO), 2018) shows that more than half of global road traffic deaths are amongst pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclist. Figure 3 shows that there are substantial differences between different regions in the world. In the European region, for example, the share of pedestrian and cyclist road fatalities is somewhat higher. According to the WHO figures, these averages are circa 27% for pedestrians and circa 5% for cyclists

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