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Research on attitudes towards autonomous vehicles (AVs) shows variation across gender, age, and socio-economic factors. While previous research has emphasized specific features and qualities of AVs, little is known about how attitudinal factors shape AV acceptance across a range of AV “modes” from privately-owned AVs to AV taxis shared with strangers. With an online panel of 834 US-based participants, we examine attitudes towards AVs and sharing. An exploratory factor analysis establishes four attitudinal dimensions: technology acceptance, risk-taking, traffic regulation, and driving enjoyment. We estimate multinomial logistic regression models to examine the impact of these four factors on attitudes toward AVs, willingness to purchase AVs, willingness to use AVs as a taxi service, and willingness to share AV taxis with strangers. We find a complex relationship between psychological factors and AV attitudes. “Early adopters” of technology and those who support stricter traffic regulations are more likely to have a positive attitude about AVs, whereas those who avoid risky behavior were more likely to have a negative attitude instead of a neutral attitude. Similar patterns were found across models of purchasing, using, and sharing AVs. The results imply that people who support traffic regulations may perceive AVs as a safer transport mode than human-driven cars, while those who avoid risk-taking behavior may perceive AVs to be more dangerous. However, we find that a large fraction of the population is not yet ready to use an AV with no driver, and overall reluctance to share a ride in an AV taxi.

Transportation planning research addresses accessibility from diverse approaches, focusing varyingly on the usability of the transportation system as a whole, a particular mode, the pattern of land uses, or the wherewithal of individuals and communities to make use of those systems. One aspect of accessibility that has received relatively little attention from planners is its cognitive, experiential aspect. Individuals' activity and travel choices require not just money and time but also information about opportunities in the city. This component of an individual's accessibility is highly personal but also dependent on the terrain of land uses and transportation options shaped by planners and policymakers. I seek to extend current accessibility research, addressing shortcomings in how the literature deals with individual experience of the city and knowledge. Through a series of empirical analyses of activity patterns and cognitive maps of the Los Angeles region, I explore the factors that shape individual accessibility. The first analysis investigates the spatial nature of personal cities, using the activity spaces of respondents to explore the types of opportunities that different populations within a city can access. The second demonstrates the differences - depending on mode of travel - among individuals' perceptions of the city, even when location is held constant. The third analysis continues an exploration of the personal city by considering its fundamental components.Overall, the analyses support the relevance of the personal city framework to accessibility research, highlighting in particular that planning interventions are filtered through experiential and cognitive processes. The findings highlight that the accessibility impacts of transportation and land use patterns are felt not just in the instantaneous calculations of a microeconomic choice framework, but also in the long-term, developmental processes of cognition and experience. For urban planners, the implications of this research include evidence of how the built environment can effectively reduce travel while maintaining accessibility and how different transportation modes afford varying levels of functional accessibility. Overall, I find that experience, information, and learning are elements of urban daily life traditionally neglected by planners but with potential to increase opportunity and accessibility for diverse urban populations.