An Autonomous Car Tackles Boston Traffic

Attendees at the Word Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos a few weeks ago were treated to a pretty cool sight (albeit by video)—a fully autonomous car, a retrofitted electric Renault Zoe, making its own way safely around the Boston Seaport district. You can see the same short video here, which is about an exciting pilot project that the City of Boston has launched with nuTonomy in cooperation with the World Economic Forum and my firm, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), among others.

Launched January 4, this Renault Zoe is one of two that nuTonomy has configured with sophisticated software, sensors, monitors, and computing components to enable its driverless operation. There is a human safety driver in the car ready to take over in event of emergency. nuTonomy cars are now gathering data about their operation under various driving, weather, and traffic conditions (and Boston has a wealth of all of these). As the project’s partners gain data and experience, the near-term hope is to expand the area in which these autonomous vehicles travel beyond the Raymond L. Flynn Marine Park of the Seaport area. The longer-term purpose for the city is to develop a seamless, multi-modal and on-demand mobility system for its residents.  

Boston was chosen as partner city for the World Economic Forum's initiative on urban mobility because of its strong track record in driving innovation through technology, its dedicated team, and its strong cluster of tech start-ups and educational institutions.

Beyond developing a strategy for autonomous vehicles and launching real-life trials, the Boston project also involves a complex passenger traffic simulation of part of the downtown area using real-life traffic data from the city (goods traffic will be added in our next project phase). The goal is to assess the societal benefits of shared autonomous vehicle fleets in a city like Boston. We modeled 180,000 trips and 35 km of roadways in downtown Boston ranging from Haymarket to the financial district and Downtown Crossing. You can see the results of our simulation in this short video here.

Transportation use in the study area today is made up of public transit in traditional buses (56% of our baseline trips), personal cars (33%), and taxi and “e-hailing” (11%). We modeled four new vehicle types based on autonomous technology in this real world environment: self-driving personal cars, self-driving taxis, shared self-driving taxis with two three passengers each, and self-driving minibuses accommodating two to 15 people each. We developed two future scenarios, each assuming a different mix of the new transportation modes in order to assess their respective impact: a gradual personal car evolution with increased use of autonomous technology and some ride sharing, and a more dramatic and disruptive shift to shared, autonomous transportation – a true robo-transport revolution.

In the gradual evolution scenario, public transit remains the primary transport mode, making up half all use, but shared self-driving taxis represent 22%; self-driving personal cars, 11%; and traditional personal cars, 11%. The robo-transport revolution sees trips taken by traditional bus dropping to 34%, self-driving mini-buses taking up 28%, self-driving taxis: 24%, and shared self-driving taxis, 14%.

The impact is substantial, in particular in the robo-transport revolution scenario. It includes:

• An almost 30% drop in the number of vehicles on the streets
• A 30% increase in average speed
• A 30% improvement in travel time
• A two-thirds drop in Co2 emissions
• An almost 50% decrease in parking space required

The results from our Boston cooperation so far are exciting, and they bear out work done earlier by the Forum, BCG, and others that was detailed in our July 2016 report, Self-Driving Vehicles Robo-Taxis and the Urban Mobility Revolution. To be sure, there are plenty of questions that our project and other projects and experiments around the world are trying to answer about AVs. These questions include, what are critical elements for successful collaboration between the public and private sector to enable AV deployment and new forms of urban transportation? And which regulatory and societal prerequisites are needed for these changes?

When it comes to AVs’ ultimate impact on society, especially in urban areas, the most important question may be behavioral and regulatory rather than technological or organizational. And that is, to what extent, and how quickly, are city residents willing to embrace – and can they be incentivized to embrace – ride-sharing, which is the real key to unlocking the full potential of autonomous mobility?