Simulation of price, customer behaviour and system impact for a cost-covering automated taxi system in Zurich

Automated Mobility on Demand (AMoD) is a concept that has recently generated much discussion. In cases where large-scale adoption of an automated taxi service is anticipated, the service’s impacts may become relevant to key transport system metrics, and thus to transport planners and policy-makers as well. In light of this increasingly important question, this paper presents an agent-based transport simulation with (single passenger) AMoD. In contrast to earlier studies, all scenario data (including demand patterns, cost assumptions and customer behaviour) is obtained for one specific area, the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The simulation study fuses information from a detailed bottom-up cost analysis of mobility services in Switzerland, a specifically tailored Stated-Preferences survey about automated mobility services conducted in the canton of Zurich, and a detailed agent-based transport simulation for the city, based on MATSim. Methodologically, a comprehensive approach is presented that iteratively runs these components to derive states in which service cost, waiting times and demand are in equilibrium for a cost-covering AMoD operator with predefined fleet size. For Zurich, several cases are examined, with 4,000 AMoD vehicles leading to the maximum demand of around 150,000 requests per day that can be attracted by the system. Within these parameters, the simulation results show that customers are willing to accept average waiting times of around 4 min at a price of 0.75 CHF/km. Further cost-covering cases with lower demand are presented, where either smaller fleet sizes lead to higher waiting times, or larger fleet sizes lead to higher costs. While our simulations indicate that an AMoD system in Zurich can bring benefits to the users, they show that the system impact is largely negative. Caused by modal shifts, our simulations show an increase of driven distance of up to 100%. All examined fleet configurations of the unregulated, cost-covering, single-passenger, door-to-door AMoD service are found to be highly counter-productive on a path towards a more shared and active transport system. Accordingly, policy recommendations for regulation are discussed.