Henrik Detjen, Irawan Nurhas, Stefan Geisler

• Public transportation will become highly automated in the future, and at some point, human drivers are no longer necessary. Today many people are skeptical about such scenarios of autonomous public transport (abbr.: APT). In this paper, we assess users’ subjective priority of different factors that lead to personal acceptance or rejection of APT using an adapted online version of the Q-Methodology with 44 participants. We found four prototypical attitudes to which subgroups of participants relate: 1) technical enthusiasts, 2) social skeptics, 3) service-oriented non-enthusiasts, and 4) technology-oriented non-enthusiasts. We provide an unconventional perspective on APT acceptance that helps practitioners prioritize design requirements and communicate, targeting users’ specific attitudes.