CityMobil2: Challenges and Opportunities of Fully Automated Mobility

The main benefits of road automation will be obtained when cars will drive themselves with or without passengers on-board and on any kind of roads, especially in urban areas. This will allow the creation of new transport services—forms of shared mobility, which will enable seamless mobility from door to door without the need of owning a vehicle. To enable this vision, vehicles will not just need to become “autonomous” when automated; they will need to become part of an Automated Road Transport System (ARTS). The CityMobil2 EC project mission is progressing toward this vision defining and demonstrating the legal and technical frameworks necessary to enable ARTS on the roads. After a thorough revision of the literature which allows us to state that automation will perform its best when it will be full-automation and vehicles will be allowed to circulate in urban environments, the paper identifies where these transport systems perform their best, with medium size vehicle as on-demand transport services feeding conventional mass transits in the suburbs of large cities, on radial corridors as complementary mass transits with large busses and platoons of them and as main public transport for small cities with personal vehicles; then defines the infrastructural requirements to insert safely automated vehicles and transport systems in urban areas. Finally it defines the vehicle technical requirements to do so.