On conclusion of the project the Levitate team had identified the most significant CCAM services with potential to impact on cities at a societal level and these formed the basis of the subsequent impact assessments. The services include automated public transport systems, infrastructure-based technologies such as dedicated CAV lanes or GLOSA, Automated ride-share systems as well as freight applications such as automated delivery and load consolidation.
Following consultation with the city stakeholders, the Levitate team had identified the 23 most important dimensions where impact forecasts were of most value. These were classified into three basic groups (Figure 1)
Direct impacts – observed during a trip
Systemic impacts – observed at network level
Wider impacts – changes observed outside the transport system
A toolbox of forecasting methods was developed that would identify the most significant (Figure 2). To ensure consistency the basic constraints and assumptions were preserved as much as possible across the impact forecasts. Special consideration was given to safety impacts and a new method was developed and utilised to estimate crash reductions with CCAM systems.
There are no production automated vehicles in general use and the operating parameters that would be reflected in a car following model are not known. Therefore, a set of models was developed to simulate first generation vehicles that were less capable than the human (greater safety margin, longer forward headway, lower acceleration) and second generation which exceeded human abilities.
Calibrated network models covering large areas of the cities Manchester, Vienna, Athens, Santander, and Leicester were used in simulations to ensure the impact forecasts were as realistic as possible. Further analysis examined the levels of generalisability of the results to other cities.
On conclusion of Levitate over 3000 individual impact forecasts were made across the 14 sub-use cases, (Figure 3) each of which incorporated several implementation approaches. Six of these were examined in further detail as case studies. A full documentation of each set of forecasts, together with supporting data and synopses was prepared and incorporated in a new Policy Support Tool (ccam-impacts.eu) (PST).
The PST is a major output of the Levitate project. It incorporates all of the project results, deliverables and other documents. Freely available, it most notably enables city stakeholders and others to access the results and to customise them to their own scenarios and policy goals (Figure 4). It incorporates a new cost-benefit analysis tool that enables city stakeholders to estimate cost efficiency for any selected set of interventions in a customisable manner.
Many dissemination activities have been conducted including Webinars (9), workshops and presentations (36), news letters (12), exhibitions (10), conference papers (12) and academic publications (22).
