City in motion. Urban challenge : towards mobility evolution

Abstract One of the most important and crucial aspects influencing each human’s life are time and space. Everyone aims to save time and use the space efficiently. Thus, the challenges of infrastructure network and mobility issues arrive. Although technologies go forward, the City Structure and environment has to correspond to each coming era. Infrastructure organization and flows assessment are needed for more efficient city movement. Contemporary urban lifestyles and business practices are increasingly dependent on mobility. Hence, urban planners are facing the difficult dilemma in dealing with the tension between the essential role of mobility in enhancing cities’ welfare and well-being and the lack of sustainability of present urban mobility practices. The common problems that we face in mobility, nowadays, are vital-high traffic congestion, accidents and crashes, vehicle emissions and pollution, insecurity, inefficient transportation system, etc. In order to solve these kind of problems efficiently, a broad and multidisciplinary approach is needed. Along with digital-technological evolution and social, environmental demands the breakthrough concept and its path arrives-which is “Autonomous Vehicles which will enable efficient and sustainable Mobility in the City”. The vision and guide of this work will be-how to make SDVs (self-driving vehicles) or in this case-“Computer on wheels” work in the City? The innovation lies in making the vehicle more than just a way of movement but make it a personal computer in motion . Accordingly, new mobility system is being build along with different innovative technological tools deployment . The aim of the following study is to face the potential obstacles of the upcoming technology, analyze its benefits and impacts overall, and specifically on city design and infrastructure. The initial idea of “Self-Driving Vehicles” was born in the beginning of 20th century but has passed with a label of science fiction and, probably because of its incompatibility and inefficiency with the flowing era. In comparison, nowadays evolution and trends lead to the opportunity of SDVs solve and overcome global issues. Two of those are: the demographic growth and future increase of city urbanization, and environmental sustainability weakness due to high GHG emissions and pollution. Autonomous vehicles are going to reduce potential crashes up to 90% , significantly reduce the traffic capacity and parking as they support sharing and connected vehicles concept and as due to the studies below, they are going to be electric, thus, the pollution and emissions of gasoline and fuel are going to be dramatically cut down. In the following work are going to be considered the technological, urbanistic, environmental, economic and market issues. Thereby, the output of the research, first of all, will give a broad vision and understanding of how could be the potential path and scenarios of the evolution in mobility, how high potential advantages could have autonomous vehicles and how along with its built network will change the conventional city into more Mobile and Shared One.