Advancement in automated driving technology has created opportunities for smart urban mobility. Automated vehicles are now a popular topic with the rise of the smart city agenda. However, legislators, urban administrators, policymakers, and planners are unprepared to deal with the possible disruption of autonomous vehicles, which potentially could replace conventional transport. There is a lack of knowledge on how the new capabilities will disrupt and which policy strategies are needed to address such disruption. This paper aims to determine where we are, where we are headed, what the likely impacts of a wider uptake could be, and what needs to be done to generate desired smart urban mobility outcomes. The methodology includes a systematic review of the existing evidence base to understand capability, impact, planning, and policy issues associated with autonomous vehicles. The review reveals the trajectories of technological development, disruptive effects caused by such development, strategies to address the disruptions, and possible gaps in the literature. The paper develops a framework outlining the inter-links among driving forces, uptake factors, impacts and possible interventions. It concludes by advocating the necessity of preparing our cities for autonomous vehicles, although a wider uptake may take quite some time.
In recent decades, young adults in many developed nations have become increasingly less likely to acquire a driving license. If this trend continues it could have significant impacts on transport futures. Licensing reductions have only recently been identified and causes are only just being explored. This paper presents a first synthesis of available evidence including an assessment of more influential causal factors. It begins by documenting the declining trend evident in 9 of 14 documented countries; the average rate of decline is 0.6% per annum, with highest declines documented in Australia. A range of causal factors are documented from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Changes in life stage and living arrangements, changes in motoring affordability, location and transport, graduated driver licensing schemes, attitudinal influences and the role of e-communication are all explored. Evidence is in general weak and preliminary but suggests multiple causes rather than any single influence. However, of the evidence available life stage factors and affordability influences have stronger links to license decline but are only likely to have a low affect size.
1 July 2010 in Journal of Transportation Engineering
Transit service reliability is an important determinant of service quality, which has been mainly studied from the perspective of passengers waiting at stops. Day-to-day variability of travel time also deteriorates service reliability, but is not a well-researched area in the literature partly due to the lack of comprehensive data sets on bus travel times. While this problem is now being addressed through the uptake of global positioning system (GPS)-based tracking systems, methodologies to analyze these data sets are limited. This paper addresses this issue by investigating day-to-day variability in public transport travel time using a GPS data set for a bus route in Melbourne, Australia. It explores the nature and shape of travel time distributions for different departure time windows at different times of the day. Factors causing travel time variability of public transport are also explored using a linear regression analysis. The results show that in narrower departure time windows, travel time distrib...