Assessing the impacts of deploying a shared self-driving urban mobility system: An agent-based model applied to the city of Lisbon, Portugal

This paper examines the changes that might result from the large-scale uptake of a shared and self-driving fleet of vehicles in a mid-sized European city. The work explores two different self-driving vehicle concepts – a ridesharing system (Shared Taxi), which emulates a taxi-like system where customers accept small detours from their original direct path and share part of their ride with others and a dynamic bus-like service with minibuses (Taxi-Bus), where customers pre-book their service at least 30 min in advance (permanent bookings for regular trips should represent most requests) and walk short distances to a designated stop. Under the premise that the “upgraded” system should as much as possible deliver the same trips as today in terms of origin, destination and timing, and that it should also replace all car and bus trips, it looks at impacts on car fleet size, volume of travel and parking requirements. Mobility output and CO2 emissions are also detailed in two different time scales (24 h. average and peak-hour only). The obtained results suggest that a full implementation scenario where the existing metro service is kept and private car, bus and taxi mobility would be replaced by shared modes would significantly reduce travelled vehicle.kilometres and CO2 emissions.