Tanvi Maheshwari (PhD researcher) introduces her research on how emerging transportation technologies—especially shared mobility and autonomous vehicles (AVs)—could reshape cities. She frames two possible futures (reduced private car ownership with efficiency gains vs. increased travel and space consumption), and explains her approach: construct alternative urban-design scenarios for AVs and evaluate them using state-of-the-art multi-agent transport simulation (MATSim) to derive planning and design guidelines for sustainable, livable future cities.
Chapters
If you live in a city, chances are that you've experienced one of the many consequences of the private car revolution. Dangerous highways, fumes, noise, or even climbing four flights of stairs just to cross the road. Just like the car revolution, today we are facing many game changing innovations in transportation like shared mobility and autonomous vehicles or AVs. Some advocates even say that by the year 2030, most human driven vehicles would be replaced by automated vehicles. Now, as these technologies mature and converge, they will change how we move through the city. Imagine the end of private car ownership. Much faster, much more efficient travel, needing much less space and carbon footprint. But the converse is also equally likely. So imagine many more people in cars than ever before, traveling much longer distances or pedestrians fighting for road space with robot cars. In my research, I take the position that through careful urban design and policy, we can maximize the benefits of these technologies and minimize their dangers. So in order to understand these trade offs, I construct many future urban design scenarios for autonomous vehicles. And then I evaluate them using recent state of the art developments in multi agent transport simulation or matsim. The findings from this can then be used to create urban design and planning guidelines for future cities. You see, all these new emerging technologies present us with a real opportunity to reimagine our future city. And if we are able to understand future transport flows and how they interact with planning better, then we can move towards a much more sustainable and livable future city.
