Impact of Driverless Cars on Urban Environments & the Future of Mobility
In the Transport academic environment, it is acknowledged that traffic is going to grow in the next decades, while the available infrastructural offer is not going to increase accordingly. Thus, the Transport world is continuously searching for different solutions to obtain a more efficient and less pollutant traffic, three of the most relevant ones are: automation, electrification and sharing mobility. It is safe to assume that each one of these solutions is going to deeply transform private traffic in a different way, therefore the aim of this paper is to characterize the trends of these three innovations, the different deployment scenarios (covering the time horizon from the present day to 2050) and their most likely impacts on Mobility. In fact, it is valuable to analyze these three phenomena as a whole in their joint implementation in order to characterize what kind of traffic could be shaped in the future. It is well possible that the vehicle of the future will be both automated, electric and shared and it is not relevant to analyze these three factor as stand-alone transformations. The objective is achieved through a complete bibliographical review focused on the identification of the most likely implementation scenarios which are characterized as precisely as possible and converted in quantitative and qualitative impacts. These impacts are both the ones resulting from the different type of traffic that will arise in the next decades (number of crashes, traffic congestion, pollution) and the ones on mobility and how modal choices are perceived by the end users (decrease of the Travel Time cost, possible shift towards private transport, induced demand, etc.). Thus, the analysis focuses on commuting and urban traffic, identified as the most vulnerable to traffic congestion and susceptible to the foreseen growth of the transport needs. On the basis of the identified implementation scenarios, hypotheses about how the three analyzed trends will synergize are made and are used to understand how the metropolitan cities of the future will be shaped by automation, electrification and sharing mobility. In fact, the mentioned bibliographical review is analyzed with an interdisciplinary approach and possible issues are identified, with a particular focus on urban planning problems such as the urban sprawl phenomenon. The scientific relevance of the paper can be understood if it is acknowledged that urban planning is effective when the disruptive innovations are foreseen in time, at least in their trends, so that municipalities and public bodies can rule over the phenomena rather than chase after them. Especially valuable in this sense are two of the identified scenarios: automated vehicles mainly owned by the users and, on the contrary, the affirmation of MaaS solutions in synergy with automation. In order to provide with results and guidelines as precise as possible, the technical aspects of autonomous driving are obtained from literature to avoid overestimation of the capabilities or of the impacts arising from this new technology. The paper, in fact, doesn’t neglect the technical aspects and bases its forecast on the time horizons already identified from the main stakeholder involved all around the globe. Subjects such as Vehicle Miles Travelled, parking spaces and allocation of the parking spots, increased inclusion of people with reduced mobility, new business cases and the coexistence with public transport lines are analyzed and hypothesized for the different deployment scenarios obtained from the bibliographic review. It should be highlighted how different cities can have different needs and feature that will surely influence how said cities will adapt to the three considered innovations. For this reason, this paper approaches the subject on a high level, producing guidelines and recommendations that can be applied to different urban realities without losing relevance. In fact, on the basis of the exposed forecast activity, probable issues and possible solutions are identified, highlighting what are the approaches or the best practices able to dampen or nullify the disruptive effects of the analyzed trends and to capitalize on the positive effects that both automation, electrification and sharing mobility can have on how people build our cities.
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Supplemental Notes:
- Abstract used by permission of Association for European Transport.
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Corporate Authors:
Association for European Transport (AET)
1 Vernon Mews, Vernon Street, West Kensington
London W14 0RL, -
Authors:
- Studer, Luca
- Parmar, Rahul
- Agriesti, Serio
- Ponti, Marco
- Gandini, Paolo
- Marchionni, Giovanna
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Conference:
- European Transport Conference 2019
- Location: Dublin , Ireland
- Date: 2019-10-9 to 2019-10-11
- Publication Date: 2019
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Pagination: 29p
- Monograph Title: European Transport Conference 2019
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Autonomous vehicles; City planning; Electric vehicles; Environmental impacts; Forecasting; Guidelines; Infrastructure; Literature reviews; Recommendations; Shared mobility; Technological innovations; Urban areas
- Identifier Terms: Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS)
- Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Environment; Highways; Vehicles and Equipment;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01753718
- Record Type: Publication
- Files: TRIS
- Created Date: Sep 29 2020 11:19AM