Overview
CityNetMobil focused on automated transport systems and its approach was to organise dissemination actions to raise awareness around these systems. Awareness to increase acceptance by politicians, local mobility planners and general public, of automated transport systems as a more inclusive urban transport solution, providing better access to all, environmentally friendly, capable of reducing urban transport share of energy consumption and CO2 emission, and safer than conventional transport modes.
Seventh in a stream of projects, CityNetMobil, will disseminate the results obtained by all its predecessors, coordinate the activities of a group of cities interested in these types of systems and willing to host events to make people acquainted with such technology, and network toward other cities to introduce automated transport systems to them.
The latest of the six predecessor projects, CityMobil, first had the idea of creating a reference group of cities with the aim of receiving suggestions on mobility problems which could be addressed with advanced transport systems. This reference group however proved to be more than just a prompter of mobility problems. Cities soon asked for some type of action by the project to promote advanced transport systems there.
CityNetMobil started from a reference group, re-invited the member cities and others who wanted to join, to a selection process and then organised events in five selected cities. CityNetMobil prepared common dissemination material to inform and invite people to the events and to greet people (e.g. audiovisual material, posters and gadgets). Each CityNetMobil event featured the installation of a small showcase of moving automated vehicles, a conference and an exhibition with audiovisuals and poster display. To maximise the visibility of the events the possibility of cooperation with other scientific or cultural events was sought.
Four types of Automated Transport Systems (ATSs) were tested:
- Personal Rapid Transit (PRT)
- PT feeder Cyber Cars (PTFCC)
- High-Tech bus (HT bus)
- Dual-mode Vehicles (DMV).
In order to assess the contribution towards sustainability a number of activities was deployed:
- Three large scale demonstrations (London Heathrow (PRT), Castellon (HT Bus), Rome (PTFCC)) where technology was implemented and was part of the existing transportation system.
- Five showcases (Daventry, Trondheim, Vantaa, La Rochelle and Orta San Giulio)
- Four city studies (Madrid, Trondheim, Vienna and Gateshead)
To evaluate the contribution of the ATSs towards urban sustainability a list of evaluation categories and related indicators has been designed and put into an evaluation framework. The major evaluation categories are; acceptance, quality of service, transport patterns, social impact, environment and economic.
Funding
Results
The general conclusion is that people are satisfied by the new Automated Transport Systems (ATSs) proposed. They evaluated them as useful, easy to use and reliable. The safety, the cleanliness and the level of comfort on the vehicles changes on the basis of the system tested, and may be influenced not only by the type of service (with or without a driver), but also by the type of vehicles used to provide the service. In all the sites people would pay to use the new services proposed.
The evaluation of the performances of ATS implemented in four European cities, characterised by different sizes, geography, economy and existing transport systems for different urban transport application scenarios was performed. The evaluation of the ATS has been carried out in terms of comparisons within cities and across cities considering; transport (trips by modes and modal hare), social (accessibility to key services, low income zones non-car accessibility and number of accidents), environmental (CO2, NOX and PM emissions) and financial/economic (BCR and capital costs) area wide impacts produced by the implementation of the ATSs. Not all ATSs have been implemented for all urban transport passenger application scenarios.
Best performing ATS for:
- City centre to city centre applications: PRT in all four cities
- Inner suburb to city centre applications: PRT in Gateshead and Trondheim and HT bus in the Madrid and Vienna.
- Inner suburb to inner suburb applications: CC in Gateshead, CC and HT bus in Madrid and PRT in Trondheim.
- Outer suburb to city centre and outer suburb to inner suburb applications: PRT in Trondheim and CC and HT bus in all other cities.
- Outer suburb to outer suburb applications: The Trondheim tests have shown that PRT outperforms the other ATSs.
- Major shopping facility to city centre and major shopping facility to inner suburb applications: The Gateshead tests have shown that PRT outperforms the other ATSs.
The most overall performing ATS for urban transport applications linking city centre to city centre, inner suburb to city centre and inner suburb to inner suburb is PRT, which among other things is characterised by relatively low capital costs and a high BCR (in smaller cities) in comparison with other technologies. Another convenient solution for linking inner suburb to city centre is HT bus.
Strategy targets
2. Innovating for the future: technology and behaviour: 2.2 Promoting more sustainable development
2.3 Integrated urban mobility
Readiness
Further research is necessary. ATS can definitely contribute to urban sustainability but cannot solve all urban transport and sustainability problems. The technologies that are available need to be adapted to the specific location, time and space to be successfully implemented. Conditions that are necessary for successful implementation lay in a wide-variety of aspects:
- Political
- Technical
- Institutional
- Psychological
- Market
- Information