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This chapter explores how technology availability and costs influence public opinion, vehicle ownership decisions, travel, and location choices. Attitudes towards electric vehicles (EVs) are considered within the broader context of other linked technological trends affecting automobility, with a particular focus on the shift to (electric powertrain) autonomous vehicles (AVs).

This chapter draws upon modelling of quantitative survey data from 1,426 Americans, which employed regression analysis to predict and understand variables linked to the preference for an AV over a human driver, percentage of trips taken by an AV, percentage of trips using dynamic ride-sharing (DRS) inside a shared autonomous vehicle (SAV), and factors affecting EV charging access in home and at work/school.

The findings show that full EV charging times significantly affect decisions for next household vehicle purchase. A lack of charging ability at home appears to be a significantly greater hindrance to respondents’ willingness to purchase full EVs than does a lack of charging ability at work. And home location choice impacts of AVs are not expected to be substantial. Considering future EV/AV ride-sharing (an important component of sustainable future mobility systems), DRS may ease congestion if SAV riders widely adopt DRS for work and school trips; however, sharing with strangers may not be popular in practice.

This chapter is useful to manufacturers and fleet operators for pricing and marketing decisions, and public transit authorities/providers can benefit from understanding evolving travel choices and land use patterns to craft equitable policies, and model future transportation demand to help plan services and infrastructure projects.

Purpose: This chapter synthesises a variety of findings on the topic of aggressive driving and delivers a suite of strategies for moderating such behaviours. Examples and formal definitions of aggressive driving acts are given, along with specific techniques for reducing excessive speed and other aggressive behaviours.

Methodology: Key references from the literature are summarised and discussed, and two examples detailing how multi-parameter distributions and models compare with the negative binomial distribution and model are presented.

Findings: Speeding is the most common type of aggressive driving, and speeding-related crashes represent a high share of traffic deaths. Speeding relates to many factors, including public attitudes, personal behaviours, vehicle performance capabilities, roadway design attributes, laws and policies. Anonymity, while encased in a vehicle, and driver frustration, due to roadway congestion or other issues, contribute to aggressive driving.

Research implications: More observational data are needed to quantify the effects of the contributing factors on aggressive driving.

Practical implications: Driver frustration, intoxication and stress can lead to serious crashes and other traffic problems. They can be addressed, to some extent, through practical enforcement, design decisions and education campaigns.

This paper analyzes county-level firm births across the United States using a spatial count model that permits spatial dependence, cross-correlation among different industry types, and over-dispersion commonly found in empirical count data. Results confirm the presence of spatial autocorrelation (which can arise from agglomeration effects and missing variables), industry-specific over-dispersion, and positive, significant cross-correlations. After controlling for existing-firm counts in 2008 (as an exposure term), parameter estimates and inference suggest that a younger work force and/or clientele (as quantified using each county’s median-age values) is associated with more firm births (in 2009). Higher population densities is associated with more new basic-sector firms, while reducing retail-firm starts. The modeling framework demonstrated here can be adopted for a variety of settings, harnessing very local, detailed data to evaluate the effectiveness of investments and policies, in terms of generating business establishments and promoting economic gains.