North Carolina Rural Autonomous Vehicle Readiness Assessment Tool (Ar2tdashboard)

The Rural Autonomous Vehicle Readiness Assessment Tool is an interactive geospatial platform designed to evaluate a region’s preparedness for autonomous vehicle (AV) deployment, with an initial focus on rural North Carolina. Developed in response to the growing interest in using AVs to serve vulnerable and underserved communities, the tool integrates data on physical infrastructure (e.g., road paving, bridge condition, retroreflectivity), digital infrastructure (e.g., broadband upload/download speeds, latency), and social vulnerability (e.g., percentage of seniors and households without vehicles) to compute a customizable readiness score at the county and census tract levels. Users can adjust weights across these three dimensions, visualize readiness via interactive maps, and compare regions using radar charts and statistical summaries. The tool enables transportation agencies and planners to identify corridors suitable for AV pilots, target infrastructure investments, and align mobility planning with equity goals. Technically, the tool synthesizes disparate datasets, ranging from road condition logs to FCC broadband metrics, into a unified scoring framework, offering both spatial granularity and policy relevance. Early findings from North Carolina reveal readiness varies widely, with some rural areas, like Camden County, exhibiting high AV potential despite their non-urban context. This tool offers a scalable, replicable model for AV planning nationwide, bridging the gap between technology opportunity and community readiness through transparent, data-driven insights. It is especially valuable for corridor-level planning, rural innovation funding proposals, and long-range transportation strategies that seek to responsibly integrate emerging mobility technologies.

Link to the tool:

o   https://ar2tdashboard.onrender.com/

o   Source Code available at: https://github.com/tml-ncat/Ar2tdashboard

Related Publications:

o   Alaka, O. B., Pandey, V., & Khattak, A. (2024, August 1). Investigating automated shuttle readiness for rural areas: A North Carolina case study. Paper presented at the 2025 Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, Washington, DC. Currently under second-round review at Transportation Research Record.

o   Alaka, O. B., Pandey, V., & Khattak, A. (2025, February). Investigating automated shuttle readiness for rural areas: A North Carolina case study. Poster version presented at the 2024 NCDOT Research and Innovation Symposium and awarded Best Poster.

o   Alaka, O. B., Manikkavasagam, N., Quansah, D., Pandey, V., & Nagarajan, S. (2025). A multi-criteria corridor readiness framework for autonomous vehicles: A rural North Carolina case study [Manuscript submitted for presentation]. TRB 105th Annual Meeting, Transportation Research Board.