Abstract
Connected, autonomous driving and social sustainability issues in urban environments demand to rethink the way, in which public and private transport is financed. The idea of in-vehicle advertisement is often discussed in press and literature as the prevailing solution for a cheap or even free-to-use mobility (see e.g. Gergshorn, 2017; Bertoncello et al., 2016). However, a transparent calculation of the revenue potentials and distributions is still missing. Within this paper, a data-driven approach is conducted. Based on real-world datasets about mobility demand and supply, a fleet of autonomous taxis – so-called Robocabs – is simulated and the advertisement revenue for multiple trips in New York City (NYC) is predicted. Within the analysis, we formulate three revenue model scenarios: One conservative and two, which focus especially on new advertisement opportunities for Robocabs. The conducted calculations show that advertisement approaches are not sufficient to guarantee a free-to-use Taxicab fleet: The average proportion of advertising revenue relative to the taxi fare varies from 1.99% in the first scenario to 5.56% in the third. Additionally, the dispersion of per-trip-revenue increases too, posing additional challenges with respect to the attribution of the value.