Stephen Miller published an article “Instead of Building De Blasio’s Streetcar, What If We Had Self-Driving Uber Vans” in The Village Voice. The article was a discussion focusing on the Brooklyn-Queens (BQX) streetcar, and the feasibility of replacing it with a fleet of self-driving, on-demand vans. The BUILT study developed an event-based simulation model to compare the performance of shared autonomous vehicle system against light rail system under the same demand patterns, route alignment, and operating speeds. The study was presented at the 96th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board on January 11th, 2017 in Washington, D.C., and will be published in the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board.
A pre-print of the paper can be found here: