On exploring the potentialities of autonomous vehicles in urban spatial planning

Sustainability is nowadays an overarching concept for transport policy and planning around the world. Focusing on urban areas, the problem of congestion, combined with the need to reduce emissions into the atmosphere and increase road safety, has led national and European administrations to develop initiatives to support the so-called "soft mobility" (i.e., the mobility of pedestrians, cyclists). On the other hand, the introduction of autonomous vehicles will lead to significant changes in the interaction between traffic flow and infrastructure. Given this premise, the aim of this paper consists of modelling the interaction between urban space and autonomous vehicles mobility to explore possible benefits deriving by their market penetration. In detail, the paper presents a network design problem able to optimally identify which links of the road network can be considered superfluous in an autonomous vehicle scenario and, therefore, can be eliminated, to reuse them for the soft mobility. A case study is presented to show the proposed network design approach.