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The Driverless City: How will AVs shape cities in the future?
Abstract and Figures
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are poised to become the next revolution in mobility. Marketers and engineers enthusiastically promise numerous benefits that AVs will deliver in a future without human drivers: huge reductions in accidents, parking spots, congestion, even the elimination of the loathsome commute among many others. But there are as many, if not more potential ways that the AV revolution can also go wrong: worsening traffic and congestion, urban sprawl, and eroding public transit, for example.
How will Autonomous Vehicles shape cities in the future? The Driverless City is not one city: it is many. AVs could be a boon or a debacle. They could even be both at the same time. An extensive literature review revealed a broad cone of possibilities: a myriad different impacts that driverless vehicles could have on different aspects of a city. After synthesizing these into ten main areas of impact, key scenarios are expounded with supplemental foresight. This top-down approach is followed by a bottom-up research workshop where non-expert participants from the general public weighed in on the synthesis and scenarios, and expressed their own thoughts and concerns about what The Driverless City could be. Then, a group of experts helped narrow the cone of possibility into much tighter cones of probability using the Delphi research method. These forecasts and projections shine a spotlight on the key considerations that city planners, urban designers, policy makers and other decision-makers should be taking now to promote desirable outcomes for their city, and curtail undesirable ones.
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... On the one hand, the reduction in car space would allow the improvement of conditions for pedestrians by widening sidewalks [21,63]. This proposal is taken up in most studies, despite the potential costs involved in replacing underground utility infrastructures [64]. On the other hand, it would create more lanes dedicated to bicycles and other personal mobility vehicles to travel short distances, usually the first and last leg of a journey, and their parking spaces [65]. ...
The advent of autonomous vehicles (AVs) has the potential to drastically change society and the way we understand, plan and design cities and regions, just as automobiles did a century ago. In the current context of climate change, sustainable urban environments based on active mobility (walking and cycling), urban proximity and green spaces, are increasingly in demand, leading to the emergence of new interventions and urban models. Although these trends may be affected by the arrival of AVs, most decision-makers and planners still do not address these issues in their current planning. This is because of the confusion associated with the diversity of impacts of AVs, but also by the lack of design recommendations and planning tools. To shed light on these aspects, this paper reviews the relationship between mobility and urban public space, the impacts of AVs on urban space and design proposals and strategies aimed at configuring driverless cities, with special focus on street design. The results of the review show that the implementation of AVs can be a great opportunity to liberate urban space and reclaim it for people, in line with new urban models such as the superblocks (Barcelona), the 15-minute city (Paris), or tactical urbanism interventions against COVID-19. However, it may also entail risks such as a reduction in active mobility or public transport use. The magnitude and direction of these impacts will depend on crucial decisions that need to be taken now, such as encouraging shared used over ownership, and establishing citizen-centred urban planning and design objectives and strategies to make AV deployment the most beneficial for all.
This chapter reviews the notion (and visions) of the Automated City in popular press, and in research publications, and then attempts to outline a conceptualisation of the Automated City. We first discuss what form the Automated City can take, from a mainly technological perspective. But a city is really constituted by its human inhabitants. We then discuss the Automated City in relation to its inhabitants via metaphors as guiding lenses through which one can view and shape developments towards a vision of the humane Automated City.
The previous chapter discussed particular issues in relation to Automated Vehicles, urban robots and urban drones. This chapter discusses visions, perspectives and challenges of the Automated City more generally, including aspirational visions of future cities, what must be overcome or addressed towards a favourable notion of the Automated City, and issues of governance, new business models, city transportation, sustainability, real-time tracking, urban edge computing, blockchain, technical challenges of cooperation, and trust, fairness and ethics in relation to AI and algorithms in the city—we elaborate on the last two aspects in more detail.
The book outlines the concept of the Automated City, in the context of smart city research and development. While there have been many other perspectives on the smart city such as the participatory city and the data-centric city, this book focuses on automation for the smart city based on current and emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. The book attempts to provide a balanced view, outlining the promises and potential of the Automated City as well as the perils and challenges of widespread automation in the city.
The book discusses, at some depth, automated vehicles, urban robots and urban drones as emerging technologies that will automate many aspects of city life and operation, drawing on current work and research literature. The book also considers broader perspectives of the future city, in the context of automation in the smart city, including aspirational visions of cities, transportation, new business models, and socio-technological challenges, from urban edge computing, ethics of the Automated City and smart devices, to large scale cooperating autonomous systems in the city.
As illustrations of what constitutes the Automated City, this chapter highlights (among many) three types of technologies: (1) automated vehicles, (2) robots in indoor public spaces and outdoors (on city streets, e.g., cleaning robots, delivery robots, and other applications), and (3) drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in urban environments, discussing their potential and specific issues. Existing advancements and current limitations are highlighted, including technical challenges, human-machine interaction, and socio-technical issues including governance and safety for these three types of technologies.
This research examines whether transportation network companies (TNCs), such as Uber and Lyft, live up to their stated vision of reducing congestion in major cities. Existing research has produced conflicting results and has been hampered by a lack of data. Using data scraped from the application programming interfaces of two TNCs, combined with observed travel time data, we find that contrary to their vision, TNCs are the biggest contributor to growing traffic congestion in San Francisco. Between 2010 and 2016, weekday vehicle hours of delay increased by 62% compared to 22% in a counterfactual 2016 scenario without TNCs. The findings provide insight into expected changes in major cities as TNCs continue to grow, informing decisions about how to integrate TNCs into the existing transportation system.
Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to disrupt all industries tied to transport, including tourism. This conceptual paper breaks new ground by providing an in-depth imaginings approach to the potential future far-reaching implications of CAVs for urban tourism. Set against key debates in urban studies and urban tourism, we discuss the enchantments and apprehensions surrounding CAVs and how they may impact cities in terms of tourism transport mode use, spatial changes, tourism employment and the night-time visitor economy, leading to new socioeconomic opportunities and a range of threats and inequities. We provide a concluding agenda that sets the foundation for a new research sub-field on CAVs and tourism, of relevance to urban planners, policymakers and the tourism industry.
Automated vehicles (AVs) could completely change mobility in the coming years and decades. As AVs are still under development and gathering empirical data for further analysis is not yet possible, existing studies mainly applied models and simulations to assess their impact. This paper provides a comprehensive review of modelling studies investigating the impacts of AVs on travel behaviour and land use. It shows that AVs are mostly found to increase vehicle miles travelled and reduce public transport and slow modes share. This particularly applies to private AVs, which are also leading to a more dispersed urban growth pattern. Shared automated vehicle fleets, conversely, could have positive impacts, including reducing the overall number of vehicles and parking spaces. Moreover, if it is assumed that automation would make the public transport system more efficient, AVs could lead to a favouring of urbanisation processes. However, results are very sensitive to model assumptions which are still very uncertain (e.g. the perception of time in AVs) and more research to gain further insight should have priority in future research as well as the development of the models and their further adaptation to AVs.
Global citizens get few moments to rethink streets and make decisions that will both serve the basic purposes of transportation and address urgent challenges like climate change, rising obesity, social isolation and conflict-all while expanding opportunities for general happiness throughout society. Such a pivotal moment is upon us, as autonomous vehicles represent a potentially disruptive technology that can re-make the city for good or for ill. City planners, policy makers and community residents have a unique, and immediate, opportunity to rethink their streets with purposeful and creative consideration about how this critical public good may best serve the public for generations to come. urbanism next research
This report, released by the Residential & Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario (RCCAO.com), is applicable to any city with a population over 100,000. It details the interaction between two independent and competing markets for vehicle automation: household semi-automated vehicles and public-service robo-taxis and robo-shuttles. It examines how and why they compete and the implications for congestion, sprawl, parking, infrastructure, jobs, transit and other outcomes.
EndOfDriving.org is a project of Grush Niles Strategic. We examine the problem of meeting the expected four-fold increase in worldwide demand for passenger miles traveled (2010-2050) using the same 1 billion registered vehicle count current in 2010. This project involves multiple transportation, urban, and social issues.
As agents moving through an environment that includes a range of other road users—from pedestrians and bicyclists to other human or automated drivers—automated vehicles continuously interact with the humans around them. The nature of these interactions is a result of the programming in the vehicle and the priorities placed there by the programmers.
Each year, millions of automobile crashes occur when drivers fail to notice and respond to conflicts with other vehicles, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Today, manufacturers race to deploy automation technologies to help eliminate these mishaps. To date, little effort has been made to educate drivers about how these systems work or how they affect driver behavior. Driver education for automated systems amounts to additional pages in an owner’s manual that is known to be a seldom-used glove box reference. In this article, we review the history of automation deployed in the airline cockpit decades ago. We describe how automation helped avoid many common crash scenarios but at the same time gave rise to new kinds of crashes. It was only following a concerted effort to educate pilots about the automation, about themselves, and about the concept of a human-automation team that we reached the near-zero crash rate we enjoy today. Drawing parallels between the automation systems, the available pilot and driver research, and operational experience in both airplanes and automobiles, we outline knowledge standards for drivers of partially automated cars and argue that the safe operation of these vehicles will be enhanced by drivers’ incorporation of this knowledge in their everyday travels.
Survey maps global variations in ethics for programming autonomous vehicles. Survey maps global variations in ethics for programming autonomous vehicles. An unmanned automobile competes in the i-VISTA (Intelligent Vehicle Integrated Systems Test Area) Autonomous Driving Challenge on August 18, 2018 in Chongqing, China. Credit: VCG/Getty
Policymakers need to make policies for unknown and uncertain futures. Researchers in the futures field have a great deal to contribute to the policymaking process. But, futures research is often neglected as an element of policymaking. The aim of this paper is to improve the link between futures research and policymaking. More specifically, as Policy Analysis has a strong link with policymaking, this paper explores the possibility of linking Policy Analysis to the futures field through the use of an uncertainty typology applied in Policy Analysis. The typology can be used to structure the various forward-looking disciplines (or subfields) of the futures field according to the level of uncertainty that they address. This linkage can add significantly to the use of futures research in policymaking.
Autonomous vehicles, popularly known as self-driving cars, have the potential to transform travel behavior. However, existing analyses have ignored strategic interactions with other road users. In this article, I use game theory to analyze the interactions between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles, with a focus on yielding at crosswalks. Because autonomous vehicles will be risk-averse, the model suggests that pedestrians will be able to behave with impunity, and autonomous vehicles may facilitate a shift toward pedestrian-oriented urban neighborhoods. At the same time, autonomous vehicle adoption may be hampered by their strategic disadvantage that slows them down in urban traffic.