From 10 to 13 July 2023, the world of automation touched base in San Francisco for TRB ARTS, or the Automated Road Transportation Symposium. Serving as a platform for knowledge exchange and collaboration on automated mobility, Henriette Cornet (UITP) presented SHOW innovations in various sessions, while discussing the status quo and way forward of CCAM in Europe and beyond.
On Tuesday 11 July, the session ‘Automation Readiness of Cities’ aimed to understand the needs of all stakeholders, including industries, for progressing towards more readiness of cities towards automated mobility. The session focused on six building blocks of automation readiness: policy, infrastructure, traffic management, planning, capacity building (skills, training), people (users).
The session welcomed speakers from SHOW and fellow EU-projects investigating automation ULTIMO and FAME, as well as various US-based speakers. You can find the agenda, including presentations and list of speakers here.
Outcomes and Lessons learned
The topic could count on a large audience and lots of interaction, resulting in outcomes that can be used by players in CCAM to advance the automation readiness in cities. Some of the key lessons learned were:
- Potential for shared AVs to lower the need for car ownership in cities
- No universal solutions for AV deployment; each city is unique but consistent need for public engagement
- Opportunity to leverage connectivity with high-capacity transit (e.g., BART)
- Business models are critical to finance the future of transportation; potential to combine freight/logistic with passenger transport
- Recognition that cities have honest expectations about the maturation process
In addition, the following Outcomes & Research Needs Statements were gathered:
- Needs to evaluate infrastructure and street design for evolving our mobility system with or without AVs
- Needs to understand how AVs can meet communities needs; e.g., suburban car-dependent neighborhood or locations with food insecurity
- Many requests for data from AV providers but important to understand for what purpose data will be used and how it fits in the broader mobility ecosystem (more data is not always better data)
In addition to this session, SHOW was also presented during the session “AV laws around the world”, as well as during a side event “The German-America 6th Mobility Dialogue” on Monday.