Transportation Research Part C 122 (2021) 102885 Available online 30 November 2020 0968-090X/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Sharing the road with autonomous vehicles: Perceived safety and regulatory preferences Gopindra S. Nair a , Chandra R. Bhat a, b, * a The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, 301 E. Dean Keeton St. Stop C1761, Austin, TX 78712, USA b The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Autonomous vehicles Driverless cars Safety Regulation Generalized heterogenous data model Digital assistants ABSTRACT Technology providers, car manufacturers, and public agencies all need to work together to un- dertake extensive testing of fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) on public roads before such AVs are allowed to freely travel in ways similar to human-driven vehicles. This raises the importance of understanding public perceptions regarding safety considerations when traveling alongside AVs. This study makes use of a national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center to identify the affective, socio-demographic and technology-use attributes that affect an individual’s perception of the safety of sharing the road with AVs (PSSRAV) and identifes measures and interventions that can be undertaken to improve PSSRAV. Additionally, we evaluate individual preferences for AV regulations. Our results underscore the importance of the need for service providers and public agencies to be cognizant of the demographic and lifestyle/affective emotion considerations shaping AV safety perceptions and opinions about AV regulations. In particular, there is a need not only to focus on technological and other infrastructure components of AV development, but also to recognize the socio-technical considerations and human-related factors of the end-users. Our fndings should be of substantial interest in the planning, design, deployment, and intro- duction of AVs within a safe and minimally regulated public operating arena. 1. Introduction The advent of autonomous vehicles (AVs) (sometimes referred to as driverless cars) with no need for human assistance is expected to bring forth a multitude of benefts to the transportation system. AVs can improve mobility by providing last-mile connectivity to transit services (Moorthy et al., 2017; Ohnemus and Perl, 2016) and by being an accessible private transport mode to demographic groups that are unable to drive, including children, differently-abled individuals and others who do not have a driver’s license (Harper et al., 2016; Truong et al., 2017). These vehicles may be summoned to a location when needed and dismissed on reaching the destination, which facilitates the sharing of these vehicles and ameliorates parking concerns (Kondor et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2015). AVs also have the potential to improve the effciency of the transportation system; since AVs can perceive and react to the environment much faster than humans, they should be able to maintain smaller headways with the vehicle in front, thus increasing the traffc capacity of roads (Shi and Prevedouros, 2016; Tientrakool et al., 2011). Perhaps, the most signifcant beneft of AV technology will be * Corresponding author at: The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, 301 E. Dean Keeton St. Stop C1761, Austin, TX 78712, USA. E-mail addresses: gopindra@utexas.edu (G.S. Nair), bhat@mail.utexas.edu (C.R. Bhat). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Transportation Research Part C journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/trc https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2020.102885 Received 19 June 2020; Received in revised form 6 October 2020; Accepted 12 November 2020