Planning for automated vehicles

The session ‘Planning for automated vehicles’ was part of the POLIS Conference 2020, which took place online from 30 November to 3 December. How can cities prepare for automation or should automation prepare for cities? With a focus on policy, planning and capacity-building. The session was chaired by Anna Clark from EIT Urban Mobility.

Presentations and contributors:

  • Automated vehicles in Dutch cities: 3 actions you can do now to prepare yourself: Richard van der Wulp, City of Rotterdam
  • Roadmap towards automation of EMT buses: SHOW and AUTO-BUS Sergio Fernández Balaguer, EMT Madrid
  • Autonomous Vehicles: Stakeholder engagement and urban planning: Richard Laing, Robert Gordon University
  • Building the capacity of cities to plan for automation – The Co-Exist automation-ready framework: Wolfgang Backhaus, Rupprecht Consult
  • Supporting policy making and planning for automated vehicles – the LEVITATE policy support tool: Apostolos Ziakopoulos, National Transport University of Athens

Anna concludes the session as follows: “Planning is a very important part of ensuring that we get the outcomes and impacts that we want, so based on the city policy goals. Public policy is going to be what determines this, rather than just the vehicle techinolgy, but they do go hand in hand.”

The session was recorded and can be viewed below:

Watch the second LEVITATE webinar!

What impacts connected and automated driving will have on urban transport, in our local context? Find out!

The second LEVITATE webinar on 11 June was organized around the theme of urban transport and the impacts of automation on local level, brought by two city and transport authority representatives as well as the work package leader (National Technical University of Athens) on urban transport sharing their views.

The webinar was kicked off by Anna Craciun, project lead on LEVITATE at Transport for Greater Manchester, who presented Manchester’s transport vision, CAVs policy and need of innovations due to the COVID-19 crisis. Her colleague Hannah (ITS Engineer) gave an outlook about these future developments mentioning smart junctions and 5G network and video analytics in transport, which can facilitate the use of connected and automated vehicles in an urban context. They highlighted the importance of cooperation between local authorities in order to learn and get feedback from other cities’ experiences on innovations.

The second presentation was given by Professor George Yannis from the National Technical University of Athens who is the leader of the work package on urban transport in project LEVITATE. He presented the initial findings of their research on the specific impacts of automation in urban mobility, specifically on point-to-point shuttles and autonomous on demand shuttle services through impacts such as changes in CO2 emissions and delay time. The preliminary results are available in the recorded webinar. The main output of the project, the structure of the Policy Support Tool has been presented, as well.

Last, but not at least Michael Glotz-Richter from the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (and member of the Stakeholder Reference Group of the project) gave a mind-blowing presentation about the viewpoint of a municipality on automation in transport. He clearly stated that automation is already here with us more than we would think, giving examples from recent innovations. He also highlighted that operation of autonomous vehicles are more difficult in an urban context, as separation is a challenge in an existing infrastructure. Although, as 90% of road vehicles (replacing individual car ownership) can be replaced by operating autonomous vehicle services, more space is going to free up in our cities.

The webinar induced an active discussion between the audience and the presenters which can be listened to in the recorded webinar together with the above-mentioned presentations.

A taxonomy of potential impacts of connected and automated vehicles

LEVITATE is currently building tools to help European cities, regions and national governments prepare for a future with increasing levels of automated vehicles in passenger cars, urban transport services and urban logistics. The project is preparing a new impact assessment framework to enable policy makers to maximise the benefits of connected and automated transport systems (CATS) and utilise the technologies to achieve societal objectives.

Deliverable 3.1: A taxonomy of potential impacts of connected and automated vehicles

Recently several reports have been published within the LEVITATE project. Deliverable 3.1, A taxonomy of potential impacts of connected and automated vehicles at different levels of implementation focuses on the identification of potential impacts of CATs and indicators that can be used to measure these impacts.

D3.1 provides an inventory and classification of impacts of CATS at different levels of implementation and on different topics such as road safety, mobility and efficiency, environment, economy and society. A distinction is made between direct, systemic and wider impacts. Direct impacts are changes that are noticed by each road user on each trip; Systemic impacts are system-wide impacts within the transport system; and wider impacts are changes occurring outside the transport system, such as changes in land use and employment.  Furthermore, a distinction is made between primary impacts and secondary impacts.

The report highlights that the actual impacts of connected and automated transport systems are unknown and will remain so for a long time. However, potential impacts can be identified, and preliminary estimates can be developed. Most analysts believe that a wide implementation of CATS will improve road safety and possibly the efficiency of traffic operations. However, the reliability of automation technology is currently unknown, and there will most likely be unforeseen and rare events that we cannot be taken into account. With regards to policy making, the report points out that highly uncertain estimates of impacts may serve as the basis for identifying policy interventions to increase the likelihood that impacts will be in the desired direction (e.g., policies that can help prevent the urban sprawl that CATs are expected to increase).

The findings of this deliverable will be key in the further development of the use cases and provide the foundation for subsequent work to look at short-, medium- and long-term impacts.

You can access all the publications and learn more about the project here.