New recommendations for automatic vehicles 

Advisian, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia and University of NSW recently released a report on automatic vehicles and how they will change the way our cities are built and function.

Automated and Driverless Vehicles (AV/DVs) offer the prospect of fundamental changes to the way Australia’s cities work and how people utilise transport. At the highest level, AVs offer massive increases in road safety and capacity – and could see car ownership become the exception, with many choosing the lower costs and increased convenience of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS).

The report recommended a four phase, national process for automatic vehicles:

Phase 1: Infrastructure Australia or Austroads to engage with transport industry partners and road

users to benchmark community needs, hesitations and choices regarding AVs – and coordinate national policy on AVs;

Phase 2: The National Transport Commission to develop concurrent Federal and state legislation and regulations to allow AVs and DVs to enter Australian roads;

Phase 3: Government road agencies (coordinated through Austroads) to begin reporting on the number, type and de-identified location of AVs entering the vehicle fleet; and

Phase 4: Transport planning to routinely assess AV uptake in long-term infrastructure, land use and wider strategic planning.

Transport for NSW’s updated Future Transport Strategy 2056 recognises the potential growth in automatic vehicles and the need to strategically plan for their increased use with companies like Tesla already have ‘fully automated’ functions within their vehicles and Google’s self-driving car clocking up more than 2.4 million kilometres in travel.

What remains unclear is how many and how quickly automatic vehicles will enter the road network which means a means a knowledge gap exists in our understanding of this aspect of transport policy.

The full report can be read here http://infrastructure.org.au/automated-vehicles-know-road-take/