Perceived Safety: a necessary precondition for successful autonomous mobility services

In order to reach the goal of reducing traffic volume in cities, new smart, sustainable and user-centered mobility alternatives to motorized individual traffic are needed. The progress in vehicle automation offers a promising potential for increasing the attractiveness of public transport by improving the flexibility and availability of service. Besides the expected benefits, autonomous mobility services will open up a range of new challenges. Their ultimate success will crucially depend on user acceptance, while perceived safety issues of autonomous driving are a recurring theme in the media. Therefore, besides the technological challenges in any effort to build up autonomous mobility services, the perceived safety of prospective users needs to be taken into account as a necessary precondition for success from the beginning. Based on the results of a workshop with prospective users of an autonomous public transport system, an online survey was developed to analyze fears with regard to using the system. The identified fears can be clustered in three groups: (1) Fears of other persons as co-travellers, (2) Fears resulting from intransparency of the system and (3) Fears of technical malfunctions. Countermeasures to cope with those fears were defined and rated by the respondents.