Automated Vehicle Fleets in Cities: Availability, Affordability, and Access
To ensure automated vehicle (AV) fleets will work to our cities' advantage as effective, on-demand ride-services, there are three interlinked components that must be addressed.
1: Availability of convenient (instant arrival) 7x24 AV alternatives to private car ownership
AV fleets, because of the nature of their management via geofencing and the related degree of critical oversight, would be deployed in a way that gradually serves greater and greater areas to enable families in those areas to be more inclined to become zero-car families. In other words, urban AV deployment philosophy should maximize the number of resultant zero-car families within these geofenced areas rather than the number of AV vehicles in the deployed fleet. This benefits the fleet operators, the population living within the geofenced zone(s), the local transit system, and the city in question.
Our approach, called Transit Leap, is an almost exact conceptual parallel to Salvador Rueda's Superblocks. Transit Leap enables [1] residents living in identified geofenced areas (such as superblocks) to gradually lower vehicle ownership, [2] urban managers of these areas/superblocks to reduce and eventually eliminate interstitial parking of private vehicles, and [3] to merge smaller geofences into larger ones such as merging 3x3 superblocks into 6x6 and 9x9 (etc.) superblocks. In other words, urban governance of the distribution of AV fleet services should focus on gradually expanding such areas in a way that motivates households living there to stop owning private vehicles as these new AV fleets are integrated with existing urban transit systems. These fleet vehicles need not be owned/operated by cities or their transit agencies. Instead, their behavior (urban mobility activity) can be closely specified and regulated using almost purely economic, digitalized means (see #2, below).
- Rueda, S., Chapter 8, Nieuwenhuijsen, M., H. Khreis (2019) Integrating Human Health into Urban and Transport Planning: A Framework
- Grush, B., J. Niles (2019) The End of Driving: Transportation Systems and Public Policy Planning for Autonomous Vehicles. Chapters 10 and 11.
2: Affordability (social equity) of relying on Mobility-on-Demand rather than car ownership
There is an unproven (and highly unlikely) assumption that using autonomous fleet services will be fairly distributed and equitably affordable by effectively all users. It is equally unlikely that governments can afford to own and operate robo-fleets while subsidizing their operational costs to ensure a sufficient level of service for all users while simultaneously competing with commercial fleet operators. It will make more sense for private companies to own and operate all these fleets while governments regulate them based on fleet performance related to equity, environmental and 'livability' metrics.
Our approach, called HMS, is an integrated, cloud-based platform that balances targeted subsidies for integration with transit, first-last mile, transit desert, paratransit services, guaranteed transit, off-peak travel, high-occupancy and the use of preferred fuels. Such subsidies are balanced with fleet road-use fees that would be designed to discourage low occupancy, excessive dead-heading, and the use of undesirable energy sources while offsetting the cost of subsidizing desired ride configurations (occupancy, fuel, transit desert, off-peak, etc.). Measured and subsidized on a trip-by-trip basis and enabled by driverless fleet connectivity, this provides governments, employers and retailers with a powerful new tool we call "Software-defined Transit" with which to enhance and extend current public transit systems or private busing systems. The net effect is to use commercial AV fleets regulated in such a way as to accomplish three things without increasing the current burden of transit subsidization on the public purse: [1] sharply increase vehicle sharing (which is critical to the reduction of parking demand), [2] build transit ridership (which is critical to reducing peak traffic volumes), and [3] strongly encourage ride-sharing (which is critical to reducing total VMT). All of this comes at the expense of private car ownership.
- Grush, et al Chapters 12 and 13.
3: Accessibility to address an increase in curb-to-curb trips due to a drop in private car ownership
There is an assumption that trips taken in shared-fleet AVs will often be "door-to-door". Taken literally, this is likely infeasible, especially for denser urban locations. Busy curbs already experience severe competition in many parts of many cities considering the demand for parking, taxi/TNC pickup & dropoff, goods delivery, bike lanes, bike/scooter storage, and more. If AV fleets begin door-to-door services given the way cities currently manage their curbsides, then the increase in drop-off and pickup volumes will be unmanageable. In many cities, today's passenger vehicles block through-lanes and bike lanes, or double-park or mount the curb to pick up or drop off. The growing volume of goods deliveries will make this worse, contributing to a crush of robotic vehicles possibly mixed with drivered vehicles jockeying to load and unload. The automation that many envision leading to a reduction in car ownership, as well as the continuing growth in e-commerce, will not fit in our cities as currently configured and governed. There is a requirement for a new form of vehicle governance to accommodate driverless vehicles at the curb. The signs and parking enforcement cities use today, even if properly priced, will not work. As well, the introduction of sidewalk delivery drones, both wheeled and ambulatory, will require a form of governance on the sidewalk that has not yet been considered, as this soon-to-be-robotized space will be shared with humans.
Our approach, called the Internet of Access, seeks to standardize methods for requesting, prioritizing, reserving, queuing, rights-of-way, bumping, extending, queuing-in-motion, and many other aspects of operational, realtime curb and sidewalk access. IoA standardization is intended so that vehicle and device manufacturers can develop systems for consistent, safe, efficient urban behavior, so that urban planners can plan to the desired level of automation (e.g., for future Complete Streets), so that logistics operators can deliver effectively using combinations of driverless vans and sidewalk delivery drones, so than business improvement districts (BIDs) can define the level of automation they wish for their business district activities, so that neighborhood associations can accurately describe and avoid unwanted levels of automation on their curbs and sidewalks, and so that municipalities can coordinate programs, fees, charges, and fines to manage these new environments. A standardization project with this purpose is commencing within the International Organization for Standards (ISO) in April 2020.
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Everything John Niles and I have learned in our collaborative research since 2011 says that these long-awaited, over-hyped automated vehicles, their intelligence, their safety, and their driving features are merely enablers. Without proactive municipal forethought and preparation, this technology will likely improve individual driver’s lives while leading to many missed opportunities for sustainable community development. Worse, there is a strong likelihood that they will harm our cities.