Three things cities should know about their automated future

From boosting safety to unlocking community spaces, the benefits offered by automated vehicles need to be recognized by city leaders, writes innovation expert Andrew Bui.

Ask anyone about the big issues facing their city, and they’ll likely mention homelessness, jobs or the cost of living. Transportation would feature highly on the list too. What they probably might not realize yet, however, is the potential for automated vehicles not just to improve road safety and transport efficiency, but also to tackle wider economic and social challenges.

With automated vehicles set to hit the roads soon, cities need to plan and act now to maximize the value these new technologies can bring to local communities, transforming city landscapes, infrastructure and the way we live our lives.

To help inform their strategic approach, these are three of most important factors city leaders, transport experts and policy makers need to remember as they prepare for an automated future.

1.   This isn’t just about the vehicles

Driverless cars, trucks or pods may capture the public imagination, but they are just one part of the automated story. Before a car can be automated, it needs to connect with the infrastructure, people and other connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) that surround it.

Future CAVs will leverage image, radar and lIght detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors to recognize and react to anything within 300 yards of it. At the same time, these vehicles will also need to identify if there is an obstruction one mile down the road or congestion 20 miles away. While some of that information will come from the CAVs, much of it will be sourced from supporting infrastructure.

Cities need to be looking, therefore, at how to connect their existing, planned and future infrastructure to CAVs to optimize their true capabilities. Actions could include implementing vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technology, which can communicate signal timing to vehicles, or traffic management centers (TMCs), which will manage the hundreds or thousands of vehicles travelling the roadway network.

Although the first automated vehicle may still be a few years away from market, these solutions are available for cities to buy and deploy now.

2.   Data is king

Automated vehicles won’t just transport people and goods, but also data: generating massive amounts of information about passenger movements, driving conditions and wider transportation system. The more leaders can analyze and learn from this data, the better equipped they’ll be to improve how their city works.

Cities need to recognize, that updating data communication tools and intelligent transportation system architecture will be just as essential in the near future as repairing bridges and building roads. As a result, solutions like fiber optic networks and 5G small cells equipped to process high volumes of data  and create reliable ‘data freeway’ will become must-have solutions for cities committed to embracing automated technology.

3.       There’s more to automated vehicles than transportation

Currently, more than a third of land in many major metropolitan areas is used for parking. This is valuable space that could be used instead for affordable housing, commercial space, or retail stores.

Recent studies by the University of Toronto estimate that parking lots for automated vehicles could hold as much as 87 percent more cars than traditional parking lots. By promoting the use of CAVs and other innovative transport solutions, cities could reduce the overall square footage required for parking, unlocking these spaces for use by local communities to improve urban spaces and quality of life.

Of course, cities cannot do all of this work alone. National governments too need to be leading the way, providing committed, focused support and the right regulatory framework to drive investment in, and deployment of, these vehicles, and ensure citizens benefit.