UK’s Loughborough University attempts to smooth Europe’s path to C/AVs

Loughborough University in the UK is leading a three-year initiative which aims to assess the impact of introducing connected and autonomous vehicles (C/AVs) in Europe. The £5.7m project, called Levitate, is funded by the European Union and will help European cities to plan for the effect C/AVs will have on infrastructure and society. Levitate began this month and will consider how AVs might improve safety, congestion and the environment, while looking at key policy decisions which would maximise thei
December 10, 2018 Read time: 2 mins

Loughborough University in the UK is leading a three-year initiative which aims to assess the impact of introducing connected and autonomous vehicles (C/AVs) in Europe.

The £5.7m project, called Levitate, is funded by the European Union and will help European cities to plan for the effect C/AVs will have on infrastructure and society.

Levitate began this month and will consider how AVs might improve safety, congestion and the environment, while looking at key policy decisions which would maximise their benefits.

The project’s principal investigator, Professor Pete Thomas of Loughborough Design School, says: “These vehicles bring new challenges and have the potential to disrupt mobility in both good and bad ways. Our job in Levitate is to provide a new scientific basis that will enable cities and regions to make policy decisions that are the best for each circumstance.”

Researchers will work with nine academic and research institutions from across Europe, Australia, China and the US, as well as Transport for Greater Manchester and the city of Vienna. Other cities which are involved include London, Barcelona, Paris, Stuttgart, Berlin, Amsterdam and Gothenburg.

Some estimates suggest that 25% of vehicles could be completely autonomous by 2030 – with the rest classed as highly autonomous.

Given that human error is a factory in 90% of crashes, C/AVs have the potential to improve safety – but there are a number of issues which need to be solved, including consumer fears over inadequate control systems and worries about how control is switched between human driver and vehicle.

Thomas said: “Additionally, it is expected that, while vehicle automation may bring an improvement in mobility for people with disabilities, it could have the effect of increasing traffic and road use by up to 14% with a related additional environmental impact.”

Levitate will create a web-based toolkit to help city planners forecast the impact of autonomous mobility and design infrastructure to suit. It will also examine the mobility technologies that will give the greatest economic return.

Location Based Systems

Related Content

  • More openness - the simple answer to transport's data issues
    October 22, 2018
    Public transit agencies create a lot of data – but using it constructively to solve transportation issues has been a problem. Ben Winokur and Luke Segars think they have the answer: greater openness. Today, more people are connected through smartphones than ever before - and they’re using them for more than texting and calling. People are searching for jobs on their devices, dating, shopping and even managing their finances. But Forbes reports that only a select few companies leverage all the technology at
    Read More
  • ITS innovations – a change for the better?
    May 5, 2016
    Josef Czako takes a look at what the future developments may hold for both the transport sector and society. As the dust of the 2015 World Congress in Bordeaux settles, we can begin to see more clearly some of the most important future innovations in ITS are starting to be linked together: mobility as a service (MaaS), mobility pricing and autonomous vehicles. They all are based on global trends, like digitalisation, automation and servitisation.
    Read More
  • UK researchers take first prize for traffic control system that thinks for itself
    November 13, 2015
    A team of scientists at the University of Huddersfield, led by Dr Mauro Vallati of its Department of Informatics has won a prize for its research into the use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a way of keeping the traffic flowing. The second Autonomic Road Transport Systems competition which took place under the aegis of the long-running EU-backed research framework named European Co-operation in Science and Technology (COST). Dr Vallati formed a team with two fellow researchers in the field whom he h
    Read More
  • UK transport planning not giving sufficient priority to air quality, say researchers
    August 31, 2016
    According to two university researchers, UK transport planning is not sufficiently taking into account the environmental impacts of transport choices. Their report, which is due to be presented at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual International Conference today, says that road transport is the principal cause of air pollution in over 95 per cent of legally designated “Air Quality Management Areas” in the UK. Current estimates are that over 50,000 deaths a year can be attributed to air polluti
    Read More

Highlighted Content