Developing a Spatial Transferability Platform to Analyze National-Level Impacts of Connected Automated Vehicles

A recent application of the spatial transferability approach is to assess the potential impacts of the emerging connected automated mobility technology on people’s travel behavior at the national level. While there are a few transportation simulation frameworks which can account for potential impacts of this technology in a simulated geographical context, there is yet to be any literature documenting disaggregated estimates of large-scale impacts of connected automated vehicles (CAVs) on travel behavior at the national level. Therefore, in order to provide a platform to assess national-level impacts of CAVs, this study develops a methodological framework based on transferability techniques, which uses data and models from a smaller geographical area—the POLARIS simulation results for the CAVs scenario in the Chicago metropolitan area—to generate disaggregate travel data at the national level. Comparison of the distributions of the transferred variables at the regional and the national contexts indicates that the platform is capable of transferring travel behavior indices to the national level with high level of accuracy.