Autonomous vehicles

While autonomous vehicles are still experimental and nascent in many corners of the U.S., the same kind of unguided tectonic shift seen with the introduction of the automobile nearly a century ago is possible. Autonomous Vehicles: A Guidebook for Cities was created in response to cities seeking to manage and influence autonomous vehicle (AV) pilots and deployments happening on their streets, as well as cities trying to prepare for these pilots. The Guidebook offers considerations, tools, and examples of various ways to manage effectively autonomous vehicle deployments.

This report looks at the potential impacts autonomous vehicle deployment could have on parking demand and how that might impact urban development. The study focused on three distinct areas of San Francisco. The research found that, contrary to headlines about AV impacts on parking, achieving large reductions in parking demand based on AV deployment will not be easy. To achieve significant parking reductions, AVs would need to be shared (not privately owned), pooled (riders willing to pick up other passengers along the way), have widespread geographic deployment (across entire metropolitan areas), and would need to complement high-capacity transit. Without all or most of these factors, parking demand may only by marginally impacted by AV deployment. The study also found that if parking demand could be reduced, different areas of the city would see quite different results. While many areas in San Francisco would see minimal development impacts as parking is not currently a significant driver or limiter of development, more auto-dominated areas could see substantial impacts if parking demand could be reduced by more than 40%. This raises interesting questions of how these levels of parking demand reduction might impact more auto-dominated and suburban areas throughout the country. This research was funded by Waymo.

This policy brief summarizes some of the key findings from a comprehensive literature review (submitted for publication) on the impact of shared mobility services and GHG emissions.

This paper synthesizes and reviews all literature regarding autonomous vehicles and their impact on GHG emissions. The paper aims to eliminate bias and provide insight by incorporating statistical analysis.

Whim is an app service that consolidates transportation services into a monthly subscription. The app includes access to taxis, public transportation, and rental cars. The app's goal is to reduce vehicle ownership by offering convenient access to multiple alternatives.

Urbanism Next Center Director and Professor Nico Larco testified during the congressional hearing, "The Road Ahead for Automated Vehicles." Professor Larco highlighted the work of Urbanism Next and the potential cascading impacts of autonomous vehicles.

Researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School's Taubman Center for State and Local Government outline potential policy issues that will arise as autonomous vehicles become more popular. The authors recommend five policies cities can implement to get out in front of autonomous vehicle deployments to ensure that autonomous vehicles can support community goals.

AARP Public Policy Institute, RAND Corporation and Urbanism Next collaborated to better understand the ways in which shared mobility and AVs will be impacting older adults. Through a review of literature, interviews with public and private sector players in this arena, and a roundtable with over 25 experts from around the country, the project team developed a framework that identifies a range of factors around new mobility and AVs that will be affecting older adults’ mobility, independence and safety. The framework is a guide for governments and private sector companies to help them think broadly about impacts, understand barriers, and can serve as an internal checklist to guide future policy, research and development.

Using experience from working on the Knight AV Initiative, Urbanism Next created this white paper to provide a foundation for public sector agencies to approach autonomous vehicle deployment and policy with a focus on equity. This report outlines ways that public agencies can identify community needs and shape deployment to ensure that AVs will be accessible for all. 

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will impose challenges on cities that are currently difficult to fully envision yet critical to begin addressing. This research makes an incremental step toward quantifying the impacts that AVs by examining current associations between transportation network company (TNC) trips — often viewed as a harbinger of AVs — and parking revenue in Seattle. Using Uber and Lyft trip data combined with parking revenue and built environment data, this research models projected parking revenue in Seattle. Results demonstrate that total revenue generated in each census tract will continue to increase at current rates of TNC trip-making; parking revenue will, however, start to decline if or when trips levels are about 4.7 times higher than the average 2016 level. The results also indicate that per-space parking revenue is likely to increase by about 2.2 percent for each 1,000 additional TNC trips taken if no policy changes are taken. The effects on revenue will vary quite widely by neighborhood, suggesting that a one-size-fits-all policy may not be the best path forward for cities. Instead, flexible and adaptable policies that can more quickly respond (or better yet, be proactive) to changing AV demand will be better suited at managing the changes that will affect parking revenue.

This report is an examination of parking, curb zones, and government service changes in the context of AVs. Given that there are very few actual AVs on the road, the analysis in this report is an attempt to project what we might see, using the current phenomenon as starting points. The report uses a mix of econometric modeling, cost accounting, and case studies to illustrate these projections.

Before the pandemic, Urbanism Next developed a framework organizing the disruptions to cities caused by emerging transportation technologies on land use, urban design, building design, transportation, and real estate. COVID-19 has disrupted the trajectory of these emerging technologies and will, in turn, change some our original assumptions. This paper revisits the original Urbanism Next framework, taking into account the cascading impacts of the pandemic. This report is one of two reports completed by Urbanism Next on the impacts of Covid-19.

How is the COVID-19 pandemic changing urban living? In this paper, we explore the landscape of COVID-19 disruptions to date on land use and real estate, urban design, building design, transportation, e-commerce and retail, and goods delivery. We also highlight the longer-term questions and potential ongoing impacts COVID-19 might have on the built environment.

The Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, in partnership with Alta Planning + Design, Spirit for Change, and Metro hosted the Future of Public Spaces and Placemaking workshop on January 24th, 2020. This one-day workshop, supported by the Knight Foundation, brought together a wide range of community activists, government officials, policymakers, urbanists, planners, designers, technology representatives, and other professionals to share ideas and concerns, and to discuss emerging technologies such as new mobility, Mobility as a Service (MaaS), autonomous vehicles (AVs), and e-commerce, and their impacts on urban space and placemaking. The workshop concluded with a site-specific charrette aimed at investigating how communities can best prepare for these changes and adapt their public spaces to create places that are resilient, dynamic, equitable, and sustainable.

"This paper will address current progress and direction for autonomous vehicles, what this could mean for the future of transport and the possible analytical approaches to addressing these impacts."

"The advent of automated driving technology is poised to transform the trucking industry in the years and decades to come, but it is clear that autonomous trucks will not be ready to handle all driving tasks and conditions anytime soon. Instead, the developers of this technology are working to build a future where drivers and automation work hand in hand to transport freight more safely and efficiently."

The trucking industry is expected to be an early adopter of self-driving technology which could have a major impact on the truck-driving profession.

This study explores the full life cycle impacts of connected and automated vehicles beyond just operational impacts to understand net energy and environmental performance.

This zoning amendment aims to prepare the City of Chandler, Arizona for changes in land use as a result of changes in transportation behavior resulting from an increase in ride sharing and autonomous vehicles.

"This report aims to identify policy issues related to the use of AVs that will have a bearing on public health and to identify research topics that will support informed decisionmaking related to AVs and public health."

This article intends to inform policymakers of the potential effects of autonomous vehicles on road traffic congestion.

The purpose of this study is to go beyond cataloging pilot projects to determine the lessons learned, emerging trends and considerations, and examples of promising practices from pilot projects in the United States and Canada. Researchers assessed 220 pilot projects and 11 case studies. Based on that assessment, they recommend 10 actions for pilot projects generally. The study resulted in 31 lessons learned organized by pilot goals, evaluation, implementation, outcomes, and policy and infrastructure implications.

This paper explores the impacts of AVs on car trips using a case study of Victoria, Australia, specifically studying the potential increase in new trips and trip diversions from other modes such as public transport.

Increasing automation of vehicles presents may unknowns and concerns, the most important being safety, both in terms of road safety and cyber security. This report examines how these safety concerns will need to be addressed with emerging autonomous technologies by applying the principles of the "Safe System."

The introduction of shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) in cities could potentially increase the number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT). The implementation of dynamic ride-sharing (DRS) systems could limit this increase and potentially result in a net reduction in VMT.

“The introduction of driverless cars could affect how much money cities collect in parking, traffic citations, traffic cameras, towing fees, gasoline taxes, licensing, registration and other revenues.”

Portland City Council adopted the Automated Vehicles policy in June 2018 regulating the operation of AVs in the city.

Food delivery service Postmates is building delivery robots to reduce reliance on vehicles. This endeavor faces many of the same challenges as autonomous vehicles, such as safety and public perception.

The driverless car era unofficially began in 1925 when a radio equipment firm, Houdina Radio Control Co., built the first radio-operated automobile.

This report explores peer-to-peer carsharing, its impacts on travel behavior, and how it can be incorporated with other shared mobility services.

This presentation outlines the ways automation will "change the daily travel decisions of individuals and alter overall vehicle miles traveled and energy use."

This resource examines how new technologies in AVs will affect traffic behavior, and how these new behaviors will impact congestion, capacity, and efficiency of road networks.

This report examines the issues that will arise due to the arrival of more automated and fully autonomous and studies how authorities might best respond to these issues. It discusses regulatory considerations and policy choices as well as key challenges that may arise.

Autonomous vehicles have the potential to transform the way supply chains function, especially with long distance trucking.

Lyft announces that 2019 should be its peak loss year. Partnership with Waymo self-driving vehicles may help drive down losses next year.

Automation of personal and transit vehicles will change the vehicles themselves, but also the right-of-way that governs their use. These changes bring an opportunity to improve transit systems. High capacity transit must become a more attractive mode of transit in order to remain competitive with personal and shared vehicles.

The city of Chandler, Arizona is preparing for autonomous vehicles’ impact on parking by allowing developers to provide less parking if they provide accommodations for ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles.

This report examines several scenarios of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) adoption rates and studies their potential impacts on fuel efficiency and consumer costs. The results found massive uncertainties in potential long-term energy impacts from fully automated and highly connected vehicles in the high adoption rate scenario and similar uncertainties in the other scenarios. The authors outline the gaps in existing research and suggest routes for further research in order of importance.

Recent research on autonomous vehicles (AV) has shown a substantive dive into the technical aspects of AVs, but our understanding of the secondary effects of AVs is minimal in comparison (Glancy, 2015; Mitteregger, Soteropoulos, Bröthaler, & Dorner, 2019; Terry & Bachmann, 2019). This article offers a look at how automation of one of the cornerstones of many municipal government—solid waste collection—could be altered with the advent of AVs.

The development of automated vehicles is moving into the deployment phase. Automation is being tested in vehicles as well as buses, trains, trucks, and tractors. Some initial deployment could occur in Oregon in the form of pilot programs for a low-speed passenger shuttle and a truck-mounted attenuator. This guide focuses on potential impacts for the next five to fifteen years and discusses policy implications for each use case of automated vehicles.

Self-driving cars will be first available to robotaxi-fleet operators, not private owners. This availability restriction comes from the expensive nature of LIDAR sensors that make the sensors themselves more expensive than the rest of the vehicle. The safety and reliability of automated vehicles also impacts their ability to be privately owned, at least at first. Safe and reliable vehicle operation is easier to achieve when the vehicles operate within a geographic range that has been mapped in detail, meaning automated vehicles will mainly operate in city centers in their early stages of adoption. These considerations driving automated vehicles toward fleet ownership will have impacts on many areas of the automotive industry.

Existing studies do not distinguish between connected and autonomous vehicles while examining their effects of the driving environment. This article conducts studies with distinguished vehicle types to establish a framework of several adoption scenarios to analyze the stability of the resulting traffic stream. The results demonstrated the ability of connected and autonomous vehicles to improve string stability. The study also found that automation was more effective at preventing shockwave formation and propagation. Under certain model scenarios, potential throughput also increased.

GM's Cruise is working towards making an efficient, safe, and affordable new transportation mode. Self-described as "what you'd build if there were no cars," Cruise creates an experience geared towards the rider.

Ford will have a fully autonomous vehicle in commercial operation by 2021. Ford's vehicle will not have a steering wheel, gas pedal, or brake pedal, and will operate within geo-fenced areas as part of a ride sharing or ride hailing program.

Cadillac Super Cruise provides hands free driving for select highway commutes. Drivers must remain attentive to the road and must maintain a WiFi Hotspot, a working electrical system, cell reception, GPS signal, and an active OnStar plan.

Autonomous vehicles are on their way to becoming the next leap in technological advancement. Sensor technology, computing capacity, and artificial intelligence are some of the main technologies that need major development to make autonomous vehicles feasible to adopt on a large scale.

A website for the European Commission’s New Mobility Services (NMS) initiative

A website detailing the capabilities of Tesla's semi-autonomous vehicles.

Two fatalities involving autonomous vehicles (AVs) have raised the prominence of safety concerns within AV testing. Many states have considered or enacted regulations on AV testing, while availability of data collected on testing remains difficult to access.

This report develops a framework for measuring safety in automated vehicles. It ranges in considerations from measuring safety in artificial development phases to deployment phases.

The report is intended to provide guidance to Australia and New Zealand in planning road changes for the introduction of automated vehicles. Key issues that are discussed in this report include physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure, and road operations. The analysis of each issue includes different possible use cases of automated vehicles and includes discussion of optimal conditions required to support the introduction of automated vehicles.

This resource provides an overview of what technologies connected and automated include and some of the impacts they will have on safety and other transportation issues.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration outlines the progression of automated vehicle technology and the ways it will improve safety. The NHTSA released safety guidelines for industry, states, and policymakers in 2017 (Automated Driving Systems: A Vision for Safety), and an expanded set of guidelines in 2018 (Preparing for the Future of Transportation: Automated Vehicles 3.0). Both documents are linked in the NHTSA in Action section at the end of this report.

The purpose of this report is to analyze potential impacts and offer recommendations for the cities of Gresham and Eugene, OR, to understand the potential impacts of new mobility technologies – with an emphasis on autonomous vehicles (AVs) – and prepare a policy and programmatic response. While Gresham and Eugene are case studies, it provides mid-sized communities information on how new mobility services could impact their communities and what they can do about it, from broad strategies to specific policy responses. While this work focuses on the various new mobility and goods delivery services that currently exist, the framework that is discussed here is also applicable to emerging technologies that haven’t yet been introduced, such as autonomous vehicles (AVs).

This report summarizes the major assumptions, predictions and forecasts that have been made for autonomous vehicles. It emphasizes their impact and takes focus on the effects it will have on previously immobile people and what it will take to integrate them legislatively.

The goal of this white paper is to consider the impact of AVs on municipal budgets. AVs create a “potential rat’s nest of a budgeting challenge.” This paper seeks to begin the process of untangling that rat’s nest, and provide the foundation for future phases of the project that will consider potential additional revenue sources to fund the infrastructure changes that may come from the integration of AVs as well as land use planning implications.

Residential Preference: the social, environmental, and physical preferences that affect a person or family’s choice of residential location (for our purposes, in relation to the urban core and other amenities offered as a part of living in density) The introduction of autonomous vehicles and the comprehensive integration of E-commerce into the urban and suburban fabric will have a widespread effect on the factors the influence a resident’s location preference.

The University of Oregon conducted research for the cities of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver to understand how the deployment of autonomous vehicles may impact greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Based on the range of possible outcomes, the cities hope to better understand the policies and programmatic choices available to mitigate negative impacts of AVs and ensure that they can accomplish the goals stated in their climate action, land use, and transportation plans. By working together, each city hopes to learn from each other—as well as cities from across North America—to achieve their climate-related goals.

The transportation sector accounts for the largest portion of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to all other sectors, and GHGs are once again on the rise. At the same time, new mobility technologies are being introduced and fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) are anticipated to be deployed, at least to varying extents, within 5-10 years. (Waymo, Google’s self-driving project, is already operating a limited robotaxi service in Phoenix, AZ with a fleet of AVs.) AVs have the potential to improve safety, reduce congestion, and increase mobility— but they could also increase congestion, increase vehicle miles/ kilometers traveled (VMT/VKT), and erode transit, walk, and bike mode share, exacerbating existing conditions. The cities of Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; and Vancouver, BC have adopted climate action plans with the goal of dramatically reducing GHG emissions. This policy brief is intended to help the three cities better understand how AVs may help or hinder them in achieving their goals, and what recommended actions to take at this critical moment in time.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are a near future reality and the implications of AVs on city development and urban form, while potentially widespread and dramatic, are not well understood. This report describes the first order impacts, or the broad ways that the form and function of cities are already being impacted by forces of change including⁠—but not limited to⁠—AVs and related technologies.

Today, warehouses are transforming into massive “mega-distribution centers” located in increasingly suburban areas. However, the rapid delivery expectations of E-commerce will also perpetuate the need for a network of local, smaller-scale supply points.

On June 13, 2018 Waymo's early rider program hit the one year mark. This article written by Waymo includes some interesting statistics about how the program and who participated.

The Mcity driverless shuttle began operating on the University of Michigan's campus in June 2018. This report focuses on how the researchers collected data and designed the project in order to achieve the project goals of leaning how people react to riding in the shuttles and a how road users interact with the driverless shuttles.

"In 2017, the City of Arlington contracted with the autonomous shuttle company EasyMile to begin the first self-driving shuttle program open to the public in the United States. From August 2017 to August 2018, the Milo vehicles operated on off-street trails that connect major entertainment venues with remote parking areas. The program’s name represents mile zero - the point at which guest arrive at their destination. Milo operated at over 110 events during the program with a perfect safety record."

This report categorizes and summarizes efforts that are already underway in cities across the world to rethink curb management, to outline the key takeaways from the one-day workshop that involved city staff from Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, and to identify major research gaps.

This paper is concerned with the relationship between road infrastructure and safety for both conventional and increasingly-autonomous vehicles as the latter become more common on road networks. Understanding the current situation and looking forward may relieve some of the anxieties described above. The paper provides a framework for considering these issues and works within the structure of the Johari Window.

Motion sickness is a serious consideration on any car trip where you’re not driving. So what are we supposed to do in self-driving vehicles? Researchers are finally looking into this question with an experiment designed to see just what makes people like us so sick.

This is an exercise that deconstructs an urban and a suburban streetscape using the Restreet.com participatory design tool. Restreet was created by William Riggs, Mike Boswell and Ryder Ross in 2016 as a code fork from the Code for America project Streetmix. The idea was to democratize the way we plan streets and synthesize that data for policy and decision-making. The streets depicted show right-of-way needs eroding due to the prevalence of autonomous vehicles creating efficiency or the policy decision to do so in advance of their adoption. The final two slides show the submissions from the over 6,000 users since September and the related summary statistics. All suggest that policy that supports traffic calming and lane reductions to support multimodal transportation might be appropriate in the immediate future.

The mundane automobile is about to disrupt your life. Thanks to rapid advance in mobile robotics, cars are poised to morph into the first mainstream autonomous robots that we will entrust with our lives. After almost a century of failed attempts to automate driving, modern hardware technology, and a new generation of artificial intelligence software called deep learning, are giving cars human0level ability to safely guide themselves through unpredictable environments. This book tells the story of this revolution.

In the second decade after Henry Ford's Model T first rolled off the assembly line, inventors were working to eliminate the weakest link in the chain – the driver. Nearly a century later, that effort is finally coming to fruition. With it could come either better and safer lives or a lifestyle change for the worse. The book explores both futures, as well as the shades of gray between them, and offers a recipe for the best outcome.

Blog post about AV deployment timelines self-predicted by 11 top auto manufacturers.

With the potential to save nearly 30,000 lives per year in the United States, autonomous vehicles portend the most significant advance in auto safety history by shifting the focus from minimization of post-crash injury to collision prevention. I have delineated the important public health implications of autonomous vehicles and provided a brief analysis of a critically important ethical issue inherent in autonomous vehicle design. The broad expertise, ethical principles, and values of public health should be brought to bear on a wide range of issues pertaining to autonomous vehicles.

This policy paper focuses on the primary concept of the street as space that can be repurposed – real estate that can be allocated in similar or different ways than done currently. Cities generally refer to this publicly owned and regulated space from one side of the street to the other as the right of way (ROW). Our focus is on the centrality of the ROW in dictating many other community functions and values – transportation and otherwise. And our particular bias is to focus on the opportunities that AV technology is likely to create to rethink how the ROW is allocated, so that our communities can meet their substantial and unique environmental, social, and economic challenges.

This report was developed to inform a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) workshop, held in September 2015, exploring emerging technological trends in transportation. This paper provides an overview of select developing transportation technologies and includes a discussion of the policy implications of these new technological trends.

This paper, for the first time, presents comparable projections of travel behavior impacts of the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) into the private car fleet for two countries, namely the USA and Germany. The focus is on fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) which allow drivers to engage in other activities en route. Two 2035 scenarios – a trend scenario and an extreme scenario – are presented for both study countries. For these projections, we combine a vehicle technology diffusion model and an aspatial travel demand model. Factors that influence AV impact in the behavioral model are mainly new automobile user groups, e.g. travelers with mobility impairments, and altered generalized costs of travel, e.g. due to a lower value of travel time savings for car travel. The results indicate that AV penetrations rates might be higher in Germany (10% or 38% respectively) than in the USA (8% or 29% respectively) due to a higher share of luxury cars and quicker fleet turnover. On the contrary, the increase of vehicle mileage induced by AVs is not higher in Germany (+2.4% or +8.6% respectively) than in the USA (+3.4% or +8.6% respectively). This is mainly due to the lack of mode alternatives and lower fuel costs resulting in a higher share of travel times among the total generalized costs of travel in the USA. These results clearly indicate that context factors shaped by national policy will influence AV adoption and impact on travel demand changes. Based on these results the paper draws policy recommendations which will help to harness the advantages of AVs while avoiding their negative consequences.

As a strategic roadmap, this document does not commit to specific budgets or metrics but serves as a vision and communications document to capture a wide variety of viewpoints into Austin’s mobility future. This roadmap will be incorporated into the larger Austin Strategic Mobility Plan to be finalized and approved at a future date. Critical to the development of the broader Mobility Plan will be an extensive analysis of the resource requirements for implementation of this shared, electric and autonomous vehicle (e-av) Roadmap.

This document includes the interests of most, if not all, major issues surrounding the impact AVs will have on our communities, government, and environment once they land.

Continuous and dynamic growth in demand for road transport, especially in developing countries, causes increase of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. At the same time the emissions of toxic components of exhaust gases harmful to human health and the environment enhance – particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and others. In particular, GHG emission and increase their concentration in the atmosphere, where road transport is the largest issuer in the transport sector, become one of the most important global problems. So far actions towards reducing energy consumption and emissions have not caused a decrease in global emissions. The aim of authors of this paper is to analyze the potential for AV to reduce GHG emissions from road transport. The analysis includes not only technical and technological issues, but also organizational and in the management of transport demand.

The Transportation Authority’s “Emerging Mobility Evaluation Report” provides the first comprehensive look at the rapidly evolving emerging mobility sector in San Francisco. The report outlines the range of services operating in San Francisco, covering everything from ride-hail services to autonomous vehicles and microtransit to scooter sharing. In the report, the Transportation Authority evaluates how these services and technologies align with the city’s 10 Guiding Principles related to collaboration, safety, transit, congestion, sustainability, equitable access, accountability, labor, disabled access, and financial impact.

"This Future of Mobility White Paper is intended to inform and guide policymakers and modelers developing the next iteration of the CTP –CTP 2050 –by presenting updated descriptions and analyses of developments impacting California’s transportation system."

"Connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies have the potential to change transportation on a global scale. These technologies could improve safety, significantly alter transportation costs, and change traffic patterns and congestion." This time is now to begin having these conversations about how CAVs may integrate into our cities and the impact they could have on land use.

This blog talks about how the autonomous vehicles will change the built environment such as street design, parking infrastructure, public space, etc. It also mentions how different modes can be integrated with the change of built environment.

Although recent studies of Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAVs) have explored the economic costs and environmental impacts of this technology, little is known about how SAVs can change urban forms, especially by reducing the demand for parking. This study estimates the potential impact of SAV system on urban parking demand under different system operation scenarios with the help of an agent-based simulation model. The simulation results indicate that we may be able to eliminate up to 90% of parking demand for clients who adopt the system, at a low market penetration rate of 2%. The results also suggest that different SAV operation strategies and client's preferences may lead to different spatial distribution of urban parking demand.

One of the public policy goals for livable and sustainable communities is to minimize the use of automobiles. This paper focuses on introducing and justifying an important new policy principle. Even when car travel is minimized with smart growth land development policies, transportation demand management, and increased public transit, a significant level of automobile use will remain. As a result, reducing the environmental, economic and safety impacts of those remaining automobiles should be an essential element of a livable, sustainable community. Fortunately, fundamental and disruptive technological advances in new vehicles—automation, connectivity, and electrification as described in this paper are fast emerging to make this new priority feasible.

The "what ifs" are endless at this point. This article leaves us with only the tip of the iceberg of answers that could lead to what will happen as we are faced with major changes in transportation.

This report summarizes the major assumptions, predictions and forecasts that have been made for autonomous vehicles. It emphasizes their impact and takes focus on the effects it will have on previously immobile people and what it will take to integrate them legislatively.

Currently, little planning is being done to prepare for driverless technology. Actors at multiple levels, however, have tools at their disposal to help ensure that new technology does not come at the expense of the nation’s remaining natural habitats. This Article advocates for a shift in paradigm from policies that are merely anti-car to those that are pro-density, and provides suggestions for both cities and suburban areas for how harness the positive aspects of driverless cars while trying to stem the negative. Planning for density regardless of technology will help to ensure that, for the world of the future, there is actually a world.

This Blueprint outlines a vision for cities in a future where automated transportation is both accepted and widespread as part of the built environment. It is a human oriented vision for the potential of city streets, intersections, and networks-one in which automation can serve the goals of safety, equity, public health, and sustainability.

This report, BCG's latest on autonomous vehicles, examines the case for AVs as a cornerstone of the urban mobility revolution, as seen through experience of Boston. It describes transportation challenges, strategic considerations, scenario modeling and simulations, field testing. We hope that leaders in the public and private sectors who are considering nuw urban mobiliy models will benefit from these reflections and recommendations on Boston's experience thus far.

"To gauge the opinions of everyday Americans on this complex and far-reaching topic, the survey presented respondents with four different scenarios relating to automation technologies. Collectively, these scenarios speak to many of the hopes and concerns embedded in the broader debate over automation and its impact on society. The scenarios included: the development of autonomous vehicles that can operate without the aid of a human driver; a future in which robots and computers can perform many of the jobs currently done by human workers; the possibility of fully autonomous robot caregivers for older adults; and the possibility that a computer program could evaluate and select job candidates with no human involvement."

The presentation given to the city council goes over the potential the future of the City of Vancouver has to offer and what the next steps may be.

This commentary discusses about how AVs have impact on the space such as parking and road safety, etc.

This report combines recently published research and newly available data from a national travel survey and other sources to create the first detailed profile of TNC ridership, users and usage. The report then discusses how TNC and microtransit services can benefit urban transportation, how policy makers can respond to traffic and transit impacts, and the implications of current experience for planning and implementation of shared autonomous vehicles in major American cities.

This report recommends potential research and policies that will help shape progress towards that vision. It also clarifies some opportunities and preparatory work for TransLink to consider as an operator. These are explained in the body.

"As automated vehicle technologies advance, they have the potential to dramatically reduce the loss of life each day in roadway crashes. To support industry innovators and States in the deployment of this technology, while informing and educating the public, and improving roadway safety through the safe introduction of the technology, NHTSA presents Automated Driving Systems: A Vision for Safety. It is an important part of DOT’s multimodal efforts to support the safe introduction of automation technologies. In this document, NHTSA offers a nonregulatory approach to automated vehicle technology safety."

Automated vehicle (AV) policy development and assessment is a difficult and complicated process. Today’s road and vehicle policies are the product of a hundred years of lessons learned. They generally address five areas: safety, efficiency, mobility, convenience, and impact on the environment. Now the prospect-turned-reality of automated vehicles entering public roadways has opened up a number of new policy-related questions. Is it enough to simply modify current road and vehicle policies or will new policies need to be developed addressing much broader aspects of the transportation system? How can these policies be developed to accommodate technologies that either do not yet exist or are only now being tested on the road in constrained environments? Perhaps most importantly, how can policy influence technological design to safely operate with other road users and can we look ahead to have a better view of potential unintended consequences?

The main objective of this research project is to provide FDOT with information and guidance on how best to begin to prepare for a future in which AV technology first takes root and then takes over the market. The FSU Research Team is investigating the potential impacts of widespread adoption of AV technology on the transportation network and urban form for four key land use and transportation nodes that are vital to the welfare of the State of Florida: Downtown, Office/Medical/University Center, Urban Arterial, and Transit Neighborhood. To accomplish this, the FSU Research Team engaged one-hundred planners, engineers, industry professionals, and public officials in a facilitated visioning session at the 2015 Florida Automated Vehicle Summit (FAV Summit). During this session the research team gathered input on how AVs will impact our communities and how the built environment will need to adapt to accommodate AVs in the coming decades.

Local governments, municipal planning organizations, and transit agencies are understandably circumspect in their actions to regulate autonomous vehicles. Policymakers must strike a delicate balance between crafting forward-thinking regulations and being so quick-to-act that decisions are rendered obsolete by the changing marketplace. In this case, however, it is crucial that metropolitan actors do not fall behind the wave of technological progress—now is the moment to envision their ideal land use and transportation scenarios.