An Assessment of City-wide Applications of New Automated Transport Technologies

There is renewed interest in Europe in the potential role of new automated technologies for urban transport. Such systems include personal rapid transit (PRT), cybercars and high-tech buses, which have been studied in the European programme CityMobil. In the absence of empirical evidence on their performance, a common predictive modelling method has been used to predict the impacts of three comparable applications of these technologies in four case study cities. The design of the applications and the modelling assumptions were based on earlier research in the programme. The model results and a business case tool have been used to assess the contributions such systems make and their financial justification. Impacts on car use were often small, but were greater for city centre PRT schemes and cybercar feeder schemes. However, these schemes also attracted patronage from conventional public transport and from walking and cycling. Financial benefit cost ratios were often positive, reflecting the low costs of operation, and were particularly high in cities with high fare regimes and in areas with previously poorer levels of service. These results suggest appropriate conditions for a full scale trial of such technologies. May, Muir, Shepherd, Jeffery, & Levin 3 INTRODUCTION Automated transport systems are ones which require no driver or other on board personnel, thus reducing substantially their operating costs and enabling them to be applied more intensively than conventional public transport services. Some systems go further, and offer an on-demand service rather than a conventional timetabled service, thus substantially reducing waiting times. There has been interest for several decades in the development of such automated transport systems for urban areas, given their potential to improve public transport services, reduce their costs and encourage a switch away from private car use (1). Several new automated technologies for urban passenger transport are now being developed and tested as small scale demonstrations, but their site-specific application makes it difficult to generalise their results. It is likely to be some considerable time before cities are willing to take the risk of being the first to implement full scale applications. In the meantime, predictive modelling offers the most dependable way of assessing the likely contributions of such technologies to urban transport policy. These recent technological advances have led the European Commission to finance a major investigation into the design and application of such technologies, CityMobil (2). A key element in CityMobil has been to bring together expertise in technology and in urban transport to assess the potential of such technologies when applied on a large scale in urban areas. Early work involved categorising the technologies available and identifying their most promising applications. Subsequently a research method was developed for assessing the performance and contribution of these technologies in such applications (3). That method involved specifying in more detail four particularly promising applications; selecting four representative European cities in which to test them; determining the contexts in which they should be tested and the complementary policy instruments with which they might be tested; choosing a common modelling platform with which to test them; collecting data to understand behavioural responses to them; and creating a Business Case Tool to evaluate their impacts (3). In this paper we summarise the applications specified, the cities selected, the modelling platform chosen and the Business Case Tool developed. We then report the results, limiting them in the interest of space to three of the four applications, in a medium growth scenario, and without complementary policy measures. This allows us to draw important comparisons between technologies and between cities. These results are presented in terms of peak mode shares and financial benefit cost ratios. We then use these results to discuss implications for full scale field trials. Further results are available in the full project report (4). THE TECHNOLOGIES AND APPLICATIONS Within the context of the study the term automated transport technologies is used to describe the vehicles and any associated infrastructure to enable vehicles to operate. The automated transport technologies modelled include cybercars, personal rapid transit (PRT) and high-tech buses. The specifications of these automated modes can vary between different types of system, so those reported here will not necessarily apply to all other similar modes but are used as the basis for the modelling work. The term applications is used to describe the context in which the new automated transport technologies are used, and the design of the system within a particular location is referred to as the scheme. The types of application modelled are common across all four case study cities, though the individual schemes differ between cities due to variations in size, geography and existing road and transport networks. The cybercar system specification is similar in concept to the ParkShuttle system operating in Rotterdam (5). The vehicles run on a lane segregated from other traffic at a maximum speed of 25 km/h, with a maximum capacity of 20 passengers. The fully automated vehicles operate without a driver and have a battery powered energy supply. Two types of cybercar applications have been modelled: the first is an inner city network; the second includes several suburban feeder systems linking low density residential areas to existing high quality public transport systems. Both services are scheduled rather than on demand. Only the second of these is presented in detail in this paper, since the inner city application mirrored that for the PRT system. The PRT system specification is similar in concept to the ULTra system (6), operating on a segregated guideway at a maximum speed of 40km/h. The vehicles have a maximum capacity of four seats, are automatically controlled and battery powered. This is a demand responsive mode in which passengers at the off line PRT station ̳summon‘ a vehicle to take just them or their party to the requested destination. An inner city PRT network linking key facilities such as existing transport interchanges, universities and hospitals has been modelled. High-tech buses are similar to regular buses in terms of appearance and specifications, but are able to run automatically, without a driver on guideways. The high-tech bus application includes services on several major routes from the suburbs to the city centre, and at least one route linking the city centre to a major facility, such as an airport or out-of-town shopping centre. May, Muir, Shepherd, Jeffery, & Levin 4 CITIES AND SCHEME DESIGNS New automated transport technology schemes were modelled in four case study cities: Madrid, Trondheim, Tyne and Wear (a city region) and Vienna. FIGURE 1 shows an example of the PRT city centre scheme as modelled in Tyne and Wear. A full set of scheme plans can be found in (4). TABLE 1 provides an overview of the scale of the case study cities, modal split and transport conditions. FIGURE 1 Tyne and Wear PRT city centre network TABLE 1 Overview of case study cities Madrid Trondheim Tyne and Wear Vienna 2005 population 5,846,473 150,000 1,451,872 2,755,00