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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Xinyue HaoORCiD, Shenquan HUANG
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
This study investigates public engagement with SAE Level 4 robotaxi services based on more than 170,000 publicly available comments about Apollo Go in Wuhan, China. We use a role-sensitive acceptance–trust–action lens, in which role is defined at the comment level (e.g., passenger, pedestrian, motorist) to reflect how the same person may adopt different positions across posts. Role stances are inferred at scale using a RoBERTa classifier fine-tuned on a hand-labeled subset, and Sentence-BERT embeddings are used for semantic clustering to distinguish acceptance evaluations, trust assessments, and action orientations. The analysis examines role-specific discourse patterns and how evaluative language aligns with perceived feasibility and constraints. Results reveal distinct engagement configurations. Pedestrians focus on safety, accountability, and intent legibility, with resistance outweighing trial-oriented language. Passengers express positive ride experiences and trust, but routine use is constrained by service usability frictions such as access rules, operating boundaries, and first–last-mile coordination. Motorists adopt a more defensive stance, citing the unpredictability of mixed traffic, congestion externalities, and distributive or occupational concerns. Our study offers a role-structured account of robotaxi engagement and a scalable digital-trace pipeline that complements survey evidence by identifying integration bottlenecks in real-world operations, informing governance and service design as robotaxi deployment moves toward city scale.
Author(s): Hao X, Huang S, Demir E, Al-Hanbali A, Van Woensel T
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice
Year: 2026
Volume: 212
Print publication date: 01/10/2026
Online publication date: 13/07/2026
Acceptance date: 08/07/2026
Date deposited: 09/07/2026
ISSN (print): 0965-8564
ISSN (electronic): 1879-2375
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2026.105153
DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2026.105153
Data Access Statement: I have shared the link to my data. https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/7n4whkjf62/1
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