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There are a host of new and emerging ideas around how different tomorrow’s solutions will be from those we know today.
This article looks at the developments from a number of perspectives, to assess the degree to which planners, operators and infrastructure builders need to adapt to these changes. It will also assess how different technologies will affect infrastructure and the needs of the customer in both public transport and individual private transport.
The conclusion is that perhaps the more ‘traditional’ railway solutions are still fit for purpose as part of the overall changing transport mix - and as a consequence, planners and infrastructure companies should continue building new systems, rather than put everything on hold.
AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE REVOLUTION
The Sunday Times reported recently that Google and Uber attended the ‘industry day’ for potential bidders for operations contracts for the HS2 line.
We have all read about, watched and listened with increasing interest to the various and rapid developments in autonomous vehicles and autonomous transport. Most of the new protagonists come at this from a data perspective, and can all make legitimate claims that they are ‘the future’ of transport - or anything else for that matter - as the ‘internet of things’ is upon us.
Their data analysis is so comprehensive that they can understand future customer requirements far better than most operators. These new players are unquestionably in a position to provide individualised autonomous transport solutions, and meet individual needs in a way that is simply not possible for more traditional transport operators.
Vehicle manufacturers will be producing these autonomous vehicles - and they will increasingly meet these individual needs by selling ‘transport services’ rather than the cars themselves. It is a natural extension of the leasing package - do not sell the car itself, sell the finance package to own it. And by extension, do not sell the finance package to own it, sell the finance package to use it.
Just like mobile phones, the cost of the asset becomes wrapped up in your usage charge each month. And just like the mobile phone market, you do not have to be a phone manufacturer or a network operator to be part of that game. So you may well buy your car (or rather your road transport services) from Google or Uber or BMW, or from any number of finance companies that act as brokers in between.
But for a moment, let us put future data aside and consider our current reality and our existing infrastructure.
An individualised set of transport services pre-supposes that there is common infrastructure available to all users. But the key question for transport and city planners is: ‘How different will that infrastructure need to be?’
Cars are currently being created to fit the existing infrastructure - rather than vice-versa. We can therefore assume that (at least for a while) the new cars will use the same basic road infrastructure, which is not likely to radically change.
However, it also seems likely that at a more detailed technical level - like kerb design, central barrier design, pedestrian crossing designs - things may need to change. These details may or may not trouble macro-planners too much.
TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS
The new autonomous traffic will inevitably, at some point, have to lead to new operating systems and user-codes for the roads. Given the number of users that will need to conform to a new set of operating rules, the more fundamental changes are likely to be needed in the control and traffic management systems - this is a potentially huge task.
While shared and common user infrastructure still needs to be built the same way, the traffic management signalling of it may need to change radically to accommodate existing vehicles as well as the new autonomous ones. It may be as simple as ‘designated lanes’ versus ‘shared lanes’, but revisions to traffic lights, changes in priorities, and changes in junction operation are likely to be just one step behind that.
So how long will the period of ‘mixed use’ be? How many years before all vehicles are autonomous?
History tells us that there is likely to be a very long transition indeed. To fundamentally change the signalling system of roads assuming autonomous-only vehicles will likely be an even longer process than it is for railways. Roads are not a closed and planned operating system like the railways, they represent an open, multi-user free-for-all that makes a complete traffic management change even more complex.
There is no doubt that systems, navigation, telecoms and technology providers will be busy producing many new products and gizmos for customers to use to overcome these obstacles. But the rate of introduction is also dependent on many human factors, not just their technical veracity.
This technology shift to ‘new’ safe guidance systems on shared and common user infrastructure has a parallel with the same process that has occurred on the railways. For over 100 years we had mechanical signals trackside. Alongside them we progressively introduced coloured lights. And now we have the progressive movement to individual guidance systems ‘on train’ as opposed to on the trackside.
The railways are a planned, controlled operating system - yet it will take around 30 to 50 years to reach a point where the lights on sticks will no longer be needed. We can safely assume there will be a similar long period of mixed autonomous and driver-driven vehicles using the roads together, causing a long overlap in guidance systems.
So the long ‘mixed-use’ period, along with the existing love affair with ‘my car’, would suggest that a very quick and urgent change to the infrastructure seems unlikely.
INFRASTRUCTURE AND CITY DYNAMICS
In the meantime, we are lumbering on - planning cities, planning public transport, building railways, trying to make them work and worrying about improving the passenger experience, and all the other things that public transport planners and operators do. Are we wasting our time? Do these autonomous vehicles mean that transport delivery and the shape of cities need to change?
The railways were in decline for many years in the late 20th century, but the past 20 years has been a period of renewed growth globally. So do these new technologies mean that there could be another period of decline?
Cities, at their centre, tend to be remarkably resilient organisms that maintain their shape. Most cities in Europe have grown up over the last 1,000 years or so and have a pretty well established footprint - never mind how inconveniently placed St Paul’s Cathedral is in London, it’s not going to be moved to one side for a new transport system. In North America, the most established cities may be ‘only’ 200 years old, but at their centre they have a character and a use of space that is their own. All these cities have evolved along with their transport, and changed as the dominant transport changed.
Transport is an integral part of the city map, but the fact is that the transport systems of all cities adapt and evolve around and under the city - the transport rarely changes fundamentally the shape of the city centre itself. This is truer today than it was even 40 years ago - the aesthetic value of certain views and certain buildings, the ‘look and feel’, is of even greater importance in planning now than it was 40 to 50 years ago.
Taking more space for any new transport system is rarely aesthetically comfortable, and there is also a fundamental economic driver - land prices. Transportation infrastructure cannot take up too much prime real estate in a city centre, it has to be built either underground (where the huge cost of earth movement is still cheaper than space at the surface), outside the city, or adapt to the buildings and infrastructure that is already there.
As a result, occasionally things ‘break out of the box’, such as the creation of a very modern, new centre such as Docklands, a few miles to the east of the City of London. The financial centre moved a few miles because of land and development prices.
In the 1980s and 1990s this ‘new’ site also had a new bespoke transport infrastructure built for it - Docklands Light Railway. The DLR is a classic light rail transit system, as is the Canada Line in Vancouver or the Confederation Line in Ottawa. These are standalone, self-contained systems, primarily (but not exclusively) above ground, with driverless automatic trains, operated in fixed formations from a single control centre.
If we made a city development like Docklands again, would we build a similar system again? What would change? These are important questions if you are a decision-maker about to spend billions on upgrading your existing transport system.
