Mobility as a service and autonomous vehicles: a perspective on the future of mobility

The real challenge and innovation for the next decades consist in the capability of governments and industries to create an effective environment in which mobility as a service is integrated with autonomous vehicles. This definition can be summarized in a driverless vehicle that moves independently from a point of origin to a destination, with or without human passengers (Bergholz et al, 2000). It is important to specify that autonomous vehicles are fully independent, and they differ from radio vehicles that use radio frequencies to control a vehicle from distance. Another classification must be done with the cable guided vehicle, that are still autonomous, but with a predetermined path: for example, the metro with no drivers, that can be considered autonomous, but not free to choose alternative routes and stops. Instead, the autonomous vehicle that will revolutionize the way of transport and the mobility as a service can be referred as cars, with all the advantages of this type of vehicle, that don’t need a human driver to exploit its function.

For industrial applications, this kind of vehicle is well implemented and established, but, for meeting the standards and requirements to be used also on the roads and in the cities, the technology needs more tests and safety improvements. In a new study by Todd Litman, he reports optimistic predictions saying that, by 2030, autonomous vehicles will be sufficiently reliable, affordable and popular to displace most of the human driving activities (Litman, T. 2020). This fact will provide huge savings and benefits to consumers and for the sustainability of the transport system. Litman (2020) further adds that this optimistic prediction doesn’t consider the obstacles such as a good reliably of the vehicle in mixed urban traffic, heavy rain and snow conditions, unpaved and unmapped roads, and locations where wireless access is unavailable. Moreover, the operating costs predicted by other studies conducted by now are very high and cannot yet compete with a human driven car.
However, in figure n 2.1, it is possible to notice the difference in cost between an autonomous driven taxi and a human driven one. In the mobility as a service environment, with the schemes analyzed in the previous chapter, there will be clearly a huge advantage for the service offered. In fact, if Whim offers an unlimited plan for 499€, including also taxi, the saving for the costumers could be very high, and this will allow the company to offer an unlimited plan at a very lower price. The estimated cost difference between an Autonomous Vehicle (AV) taxi and a human driven (HD) one is very high and consists of 1,5 US dollars per mile (Litman, 2020).

In a report by Alonso Raposo et al. (2019) for the European Commission, it is estimated that automated vehicles can cut the cost of travel by up to 80%, which, in turn, increases the kilometers travelled by 60%. According to Harb et al. (2018), the automated vehicles will improve the travel experience so much that a significant increase in the number of trips and changes in people’s activities and travel behavior can be expected. The evolution will happen gradually, in a situation in which, at the beginning, automation will be rather expensive and, consequently, will be affordable only for wealthy consumers (Wadud, 2017; Milakis et al., 2018), thereby increasing inequality among transport users. Then, in the long run, once the purchase and use costs of autonomous vehicles will have fallen enough to enable their massive uptake, impacts on demand can be expected both for vehicle ownership and transport activity levels (Alonso Raposo et al., 2019). The type of automated vehicle that is expected to be the most convenient in the future for cities is the automated shuttle, that can easily cover the last mile trip and optimize the individual demand. This vehicle is characterized by a modularity concept, which is very important to optimize the traffic and the costs (Sperling, 2018). In the figure n 2.2 below it is possible to see a picture of this kind of vehicle.
Anyway, it is undeniable the fact that putting a car with no driver on the streets of cities is not an easy task. There are a lot of problems and limits that must be overcome. To better understand the complete panorama of this kind of technology, it is appropriate to know how an autonomous vehicle works and what kind of innovations and components are involved.