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).