Abstract

Cities have started to restructure themselves into ‘smart cities’ to address the challenges of the 21st Century—such as climate change, sustainable development, and digital disruption. One of the major obstacles to success for a smart city is to tackle the mobility and accessibility issues via ‘smart mobility’ solutions. At the verge of the age of smart urbanism, autonomous vehicle technology is seen as an opportunity to realize the smart mobility vision of cities. However, this innovative technological advancement is also speculated to bring a major disruption in urban transport, land use, employment, parking, car ownership, infrastructure design, capital investment decisions, sustainability, mobility, and traffic safety. Despite the potential threats, urban planners and managers are not yet prepared to develop autonomous vehicle strategies for cities to deal with these threats. This is mainly due to a lack of knowledge on the social implications of autonomous capabilities and how exactly they will disrupt our cities. This viewpoint provides a snapshot of the current status of vehicle automation, the direction in which the field is moving forward, the potential impacts of systematic adoption of autonomous vehicles, and how urban planners can mitigate the built environment and land use disruption of autonomous vehicles.

Highlights

  • AVs are widely argued to be one of the most disruptive technologies to fundamentally reshape our cities in the age of smart urbanism [24,25]

  • Urban planners, in general, seem to be unprepared for the likely AV disruption on the built environment and land use of our cities. This viewpoint aims to provide a snapshot of the current status of vehicle automation, the direction in which the field is moving forward, the potential impacts of systematic adoption of AV, and how planners can mitigate the built environment and land use disruption of AVs in the age of smart urbanism and mobility

  • That AVs haveinclude been introduced by trucks, the German

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Summary

Introduction

We are at the verge of a new urban era—i.e., the age of smart urbanism [1,2,3,4]. Today, cities are integrating technological innovation in decision-making and service provision to address a range of challenges caused by urbanization—e.g., traffic congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency—under the smart city notion [5,6,7]. AVs are widely argued to be one of the most disruptive technologies to fundamentally reshape our cities in the age of smart urbanism [24,25]. Urban planners, in general, seem to be unprepared for the likely AV disruption on the built environment and land use of our cities Against this backdrop, this viewpoint aims to provide a snapshot of the current status of vehicle automation, the direction in which the field is moving forward, the potential impacts of systematic adoption of AV, and how planners can mitigate the built environment and land use disruption of AVs in the age of smart urbanism and mobility. Such as and Uber have challenged prior norms and could provide some of the benefits of AVs if widely adopted [45]

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