Fully automated public transportation mobility: the hidden challenges for a commercial deployment

Abstract

During the past few years, many projects and initiatives were undertaken deploying and testing automated vehicles for public transportation and logistics. However, in spite of their ambition, all of these deployments stayed on the level of elaborated experimentation deploying no more than 4 to 5 Automated Vehicles in rather small sites (few Kms of roads) and never really reached the level of large scale “commercial” deployment of transport services. The reasons for this are many, but the most important being the lack of economic viability and commercially realistic models, the lack of scalability of the business and operating models, and the lack of inclusive citizen/user-centric services required for the large end-user acceptance and adoption of the solutions. In this paper, based on the experience gained in the H2020 AVENUE project, we present the missing pieces of the puzzle, and which will be addressed in the Horizon Europe project ULTIMO. In the AVENUE project we deployed public transportation services with AVs in 4 cities in Europe, where we were able to study, from one side, the full process in putting the vehicles on the road, identifying the obstacles for the different cities, and, from the other side, during the service deployment identify the passenger, and operator needs, both as needed transport and passenger services but also as economic requirements and restrictions, identifying this way the missing parts for a full scale commercial deployment.