Easyride — Showcasing autonomous driving in an urban context

Autonomous driving will in some way or another affect future urban mobility. But rather than focussing merely on possible commercial applications in the form of private autonomous cars or luxury mobility services, the more pressing question is what the deployment of this technology will mean to urban life, landscape and climate.

If driving through traffic becomes a relaxing rather than a stressful activity, would this not increase the miles traveled by car? The “willingness to share” is a decisive criterion for leveraging the potential of autonomous driving for the positive development of the transport sector. Meaning a reduction of traffic, congestion, and land use in urban areas. In this respect, ride-pooling services have a particularly large potential by having strangers with similar routes share a vehicle.

Pooling people in one vehicle is - in essence - the core concept of puclic transport as we now it. Yet, today the pooling happens along specified lines and schedules. In future, public transport could pick you up when you want, where you want. Which will make riding by public transport much more attractive compared to today. However, people do not always willingly share their ride if they can afford to ride by themselves - as the success story of private car ownership clearly demonstrates. The implications of autonomous driving technology will be strongly influenced by two critical uncertainties:

• the willingness of the citizens to adopt shared mobility offerings
• the design of the legal framework regulating the mobility market in terms of prices, licences, operational requirements etc.

The project »easyride« focussed on four possible scenarios for 2030 which derive from different manifestations of these critical uncertainties (low to high willingness to share / weak to strong regulation).

While the willingness to share will be influenced by many aspects (such as the service quality and frequency, pricing of on-demand services and urban lifestyle), regulation will directly affect which kind of mobility services can be offered and by whom. E. g. autonomous driving technologies could be deployed in the market as ride-hailing services similar to uber and Lyft (top left), as robo taxis or private chauffeur services (bottom left), as part of the public transit eco-system (top right) or as private pods operated under advanced traffic management and road princing schemes (bottom right). Which of these futures is seen as desirable depends on who is asked. The different market players and stakeholders - lisenced taxi companies, public transport authorities, OEMs and mobility start-ups, city councils, regional commuters, citizens - all have their own views where and how autonomous driving technology should be used.