PLENARY LECTURE

TITLE: Cybercars : the future of road transport?

By Dr. Michel Parent

ABSTRACT: Through the last century, automobile transportation has changed the life of billions of individuals and has become one of the largest industry. However, the success of this transportation mode has brought major problems such as accidents, dependency on oil reserves, local and global pollutions and nuisances for many inhabitants, in particular in cities. In order to alleviate these problems, it seems that a better balance between public transport (which is safer, more efficient and often faster) and individual transportation is the best way to go. However, to reach this better balance, new services have to be offered such as instant rental or car-sharing to make the individual vehicles more complementary to public transportation. If we think this new form of vehicle usage can attract a significant portion of travels, new vehicles will be developed to fit this market. These new vehicles will be targeted at the beginning at city travels where small, efficient and safe vehicles are required as a complement to public transport for the local traffic. For even better efficiency and better service, these vehicles should have more than drivers aids : they should move automatically on demand. This is possible with existing technologies at low speed and on dedicated (or at least with reduced traffic) roads. The first such vehicles are now operational and are starting to be deployed in the context of the European CyberCars and CyberMove projects. We call these vehicles cybercars, which means that they have fully automated driving capabilities on existing infrastructures. However, the future of cybercars may not lie in very small local systems. If in a few decades, most of the cars produced are equipped with cybernetic capabilities (which is the tendency through drivers aids which are more and more sophisticated), we could very easily envision that entire cities (or sections of large cities) could be reserved for such vehicles in automatic mode. Furthermore we could see new high speed infrastructures (with very narrow lanes) be developed for the same (or higher performance) vehicles). Such new low cost infrastructures would allow much higher capacity with very high safety and minimum nuisances. Cybernetic transportation systems (or CTS) would also allow a better control of the demand since the computer management of the system would not allow congestion to occur (probably through some pricing structure or through pre-booking).