Assessing Contribution of New Technologies to Urban Transport: European CityMobil Project

There is renewed interest in Europe in the potential role of new automated technologies for urban transport. These systems include cybercars, personal rapid transit, automated buses, advanced city cars and dual mode vehicles. Assessing the contribution of such systems when applied extensively in an urban area is challenging. The range of potential applications needs to be specified for a range of city types, demand responses to wholly novel travel forms need to be estimated, the unique supply characteristics need to be encapsulated, and the technologies need to be assessed when operating in conjunction with a range of other policy instruments. A new European project, CityMobil, is addressing this challenge. This paper describes the background to the study; the technologies being considered; the scenarios against which they are being assessed; and the approaches adopted to predictive modeling and evaluation.