Paper: Self-driving trucks will redraw US economic map
Technological advances in autonomous truck technology are poised to have significant economic ripple effects for U.S. interstate commerce, highway infrastructure and labor costs, says new research co-written by a team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign economists.
Self-driving truck technology “has a very high potential to change the economic geography of the U.S.,” said Taejun Mo, an Illinois graduate student and first author of the paper.
“We all know that there’s already very good truck transportation infrastructure in the U.S., with a lot of cargo crisscrossing the country,” he said. “But autonomous truck transportation can make everything even more efficient. Human truck drivers cannot drive 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Autonomous trucks can, and their routes can be even more direct since they don’t have to stop. Self-driving technology has great potential to rewrite the economic geography of the U.S., which in and of itself will create new winners and losers.”
The paper, which was published by the Journal of Regional Science, was co-written by Illinois agricultural and consumer economics professors Sandy Dall’erba, William Ridley, Yilan Xu and Hyungsun Yim.