Mobility simulation including autonomous vehicles: What about the urban form ?

International audienceA study on the increasing of projects about autonomous vehicles shows that almost of research fields are concerned, from technological domains (improvement of radar and lidar technologies, AI for best choice decisions, etc…) to social sciences (acceptability for example), including economic domain or insurance and legal fields (responsibility cases). For less than 10 years, geographers and land planners have also investigated this thematic, most using simulations software. These simulations, based on theoretical cases (Fagnant and al., 2014) or on real urban territories (Spieser and al., 2014, Bösh and al., 2016), show “predictable” impacts like the decreasing of the number of cars and the growing of daily mobility, but with different rates, depending of the input scenario. Another way of investigation, still not yet explored, need to be presented: the impact on the urban form. For this reason, we purpose to build more complex scenarios combining daily mobility and residential mobility at different time steps: as predicted, the urban sprawl currently found will it continue, extending Newman and Kenworthy’s publication (Newman and Kenworthy, 1996) on the 3 ages of the city? Or the improvement of the traffic conditions provided from automated mobility which is materialized by the disappearance of the congestion and the emissions of pollutants, can it lead to a densification of the central urban spaces