Automated vehicles and the city of tomorrow

Automated vehicles and the city of tomorrow: A backcasting approach

Gonzalez-Gonzalez, M.E. (University of Cantabria)
Nogués, Soledad (University of Cantabria)
Stead, D. (TU Delft Spatial Planning and Strategy)

2019

The introduction of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) into cities may fundamentally transform the design and use of cities. On one hand, AVs offer the potential to reduce the urban space requirements for roads and parking, creating more space for high-quality, liveable areas. On the other hand, greater motorisation and the availability to perform leisure or work activities while travelling in AVs could increase the number of trips and travel distances, encouraging urban traffic congestion and sprawl. These diverse, and sometimes conflicting, estimates and opinions give rise to considerable uncertainty among urban policy decision-makers, sometimes leading to planning inaction. This paper aims to shed light on the opportunities that AVs offer in delivering attractive, healthy and sustainable urbanisation patterns. This paper employs a backcasting approach to investigate whether and how the potential impacts of AV implementation can support or threaten a range of urban development policy goals. This approach enables conflicts between policy goals to be identified. The findings point to the need for mixed-use development policy, the clustering of urban facilities and services, the restriction of motorized access in cities and the adoption of shared high-quality multimodal transport.

Automated vehicles
Backcasting
Policy goals
Urban planning
Urbanisation patterns

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:955e4b6d-2bbc-49e4-9010-87df1254cbbe

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.05.034

2019-12-13

0264-2751

Cities: the international journal of urban policy and planning, 94, 153-160

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2019 M.E. Gonzalez-Gonzalez, Soledad Nogués, D. Stead