Study On The Use Intention And Choice Behavior Of Autonomous Vehicles For School Travel

Autonomous vehicles(AVs)have shown excellent application prospects in alleviating problems such as frequent traffic accidents and the difficulties parents encounter when transporting their children to and from school.An essential prerequisite for implementing this prospect is to enable primary and secondary school students to travel to and from school by taking AVs.Parents play a decisive role in the choice of their children’s school travel mode.To achieve the realization of primary and secondary school students taking AVs to and from school,in addition to overcoming technical challenges,it also requires parents to recognize and choose this new school travel mode.Therefore,before the official arrival of AVs,it is necessary to research the behavior of parents choosing AVs to transport children to and from school(referred to as parents’ choice behavior),identify the key factors that affect parents’ choice behavior,and analyze its internal mechanism.This study designed a questionnaire about parents’ choice and acceptance of AVs,collected sample data through field surveys,and used factor analysis and reliability and validity tests to verify the authenticity and reliability of the data.Besides,this research introduces important psychological factors such as knowledge,perceived risk,public engagement,and face consciousness into the technology acceptance model,which expands the theoretical model.Based on the extended technology acceptance model,structural equation model,and mediation effect test are used to analyze the complex interaction among psychological latent variables in the process of parents’ choice behavior and describe the state of parents’ mental activity.Secondly,from the perspective of socioeconomic attributes and travel attributes,this study constructed a Logistic model of parents’ choice behavior,and identified groups of parents who prefer to choose AVs to transport children to and from school.Considering that the Logistic model only involves the interpretation and prediction of the choice behavior by objective variables,it cannot reveal the role of psychological latent variables.However,in the field of way choice behavior,the influence of psychological factors on choice behavior cannot be ignored.Therefore,this article introduces a hybrid choice model that can simultaneously consider the effects of subjective and objective factors into the study of parents’ choice behavior.The objective variables that reflect the individual’s socioeconomic characteristics and travel characteristics and the latent variables that reflect the psychological state are used as covariates to construct a hybrid choice model of parents’ choice behavior.It identifies the key factors that affect choice behavior and dig out its internal mechanism of action.The results show that gender,age,and travel distance in objective variables can significantly affect parents’ choice behavior.In the subjective variables,attitude,use intention,perceived usefulness,knowledge,and face consciousness have significant positive effects on parents’ choice behavior,while the perceived risk has a significant negative effect.Finally,through model comparison,it is found that the hybrid choice model has higher goodness of fit and stronger predictive ability than the traditional Logistic model and can better describe the parents’ choice behavior.The research results of this paper have deepened the understanding of AVs choice behaviors in the context of school travel,and can propose countermeasures and suggestions for promoting AVs’ application in school travel.Besides,they can also provide a specific reference basis for automobile manufacturers to optimize the functions of AVs.