The Mobility-Livability Revolution: Engaging Automated Vehicles to Improve Amsterdam's City Centre

The city of Amsterdam has been growing and it continues to grow. While both the amount of visitors and the amount of residents continues to grow, the amount of public space stays approximately the same. This has led to an increasing pressure on livability, accessibility, and public space. Pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike often face the negative consequences of overcrowding. Much of this problem can be traced to the excessive space use of cars. Cars, while only accounting for 9% of movements in the city centre, take up approximately 77% of all public space that is not water. This project set out to remedy the pressure on livability, accessibility, and public space through the improvement of conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. These modalities have been chosen because their use was shown to correspond with a more efficient flow of people, a more livable city, and a more efficient use of public space. To do this, the promising upcoming technology of automated vehicles is engaged. This technology was found to possess the ability to completely change urban areas. This, however, can either deteriorate or elevate livability, accessibility, and public space. Therefore, taking a pro-active role in development for automated vehicles is essential. First, a literature research on walkability and cyclability was conducted which resulted in the establishment of eight pillars of walkability and cyclability: mixed uses, network coherence, legibility, protection of pedestrians and cyclists, dimensioning of infrastructure, presence of green, visual stimulation, and connecting of attractors. The project sets out to strenghten these pillars in order to mediate the problems the city faces. To do this, a literature research on automated vehicles has been conducted which explores possible implications of automated vehicles. These possibilities have been explored further through design within scenarios. The scenarios were constructed based on a scenario building methodology that was established through an in-depth literature research on scenarios and scenario building. The literature on automated vehicles and further exploration through designing within the scenarios has yielded 26 instruments that describe possibilities made possible either directly by automated vehicles or indirectly through interaction with automated vehicles. These instruments are priority lanes, induction charging roads, digital roads surfaces, convoy driving, shared space, subcanal parking, multimodal app, logistics app, multi-use vehicles, logistics nodes, time-dependent infrastructure, bike-share smart locks, bicycle GPS transmitters, car fleet as battery, centrally owned fleet, hodosses, park and charge hubs, replacing trams with AVs, tourist tram lines, delivery assistance vehicles, supply over water, autonomous boats, multimodal nodes, bicycle parking, bicycle sharing programme, and conditional access roads. Interactions between these instruments were researched and five main clusters were derived from the clustering of the instruments: new parking, mobility as a service, new logistics, multimodal travel, and network principles. These clusters of instruments, along with individual instruments, have then been applied on Amsterdam’s city centre to improve its walkability and cyclability in an iterative process of trial and error, reflecting the results with regard to the pillars of walkability and cyclability after each iteration. The most important findings of the project are that automated vehicles should be made to park themselves in garages to open up public space, and should be made to drive efficiently in convoys so they can replace buses and trams. Also the vehicles should both feed to and receive information from the cloud so they do not require signage, road markings, and traffic lights which clutter public space, and most importantly, should not be allowed to drive everywhere unconditionally. Rather, the connected nature of automated vehicles should be exploited to create individual route options for each vehicle based on its use and user. Neighbourhoods should not be accessible to automated vehicles unless they have specific exemptions. These exemptions can be granted by the municipality for reasons that can change over time. These reasons can include being a resident, being an emergency service, travelling through extreme weather, working in a neighbourhood, being physically impaired, or many other reasons. This conditional access, implemented strategically with other suggested instruments, will allow neighbourhoods to become healthier, safer, and generally more livable areas while remaining accessible for important purposes.Architecture and The Built EnvironmentUrbanis