Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles on Modal split Regarding Changes in Travel Time, Parking Cost and Operating Cost (case study: Qom)

According to the latest technological advances in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), sooner or later, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will enter the market widely and affect many aspects of transportation planning. Items such as value of time, modal split, travel time, vehicle-kilometer, parking cost, operating cost, etc. Therefore, this research tries to determine the effects of AVs on modal split in Qom. At the first stage, synthesized population, Households and person information, land use, traffic analysis zone information and traffic skims gathered and entered to Activitysim software to forecast the demand by using activity-based models. Afterwards, in order to determine the effects of AVs on modal split, travel time, parking cost and operating cost, which are considered to alter dramatically by the presence of autonomous vehicles, gradually changed in 10 steps. Then, the outcomes for each step and each specific trip purpose were analyzed. The results show that parking cost has the major effect on private AVs and travel time plays the main role in case of Shared Autonomous Vehicles.