Evaluation of Eight Automated Road Transport System City Studies

The ex-ante evaluation of eight studies on Automated Road Transport Systems (ARTS) - systems made of fully automated vehicles, control systems, and dedicated infrastructures, here used as public transport systems - in European cities (in Italy, France, Swiss, Greece, and Spain) is presented in this paper. The evaluation is based on measurements of several sets of indicators (Acceptance, Quality of service, Transport patterns, Social impacts, Environment, Financial impacts, Economic impacts, Legal impacts, Technological success) and on the results of a Stated Preference (SP) survey on the potential ARTS users' preferences (versus a conventional transport system). Each city involved provided a study on the ARTS application inside its mobility in the framework of the European Commission (EC) CityMobil2 Project. The cities were grouped, according to their field of application, into two categories: 4 of them belonging to the "within city centre" category, and the other 4 in the "within major facility" category. As a summary of the main results of the evaluation, there is a relatively higher preference for ARTS in all cities of the “within major facility” category, and only in one of the eight cities evaluated the preference is for a conventional system. Concerning the transport patterns in three cities the daily trips were in the range 1200-1800, whereas in the remaining five cities they ranged from 2200 to 2700. The highest value of daily consumption of such systems is 0.3 kWh/passenger·km, less than the consumption of a conventional bus (0.33 kWh/passenger·km in Europe, 0.44 kWh/passenger·km in the U.S.).