Abstract Manager

Current urban streets, rural roads, and highway design and maintenance processes are creating enormous financial strain on mobility programs and budgets. Most cities are requesting higher government funding to repair mega-size mobility infrastructures. Future mobility master plans and infrastructure needs are forecast to spend an enormous amount of public money albeit it may not be necessary when autonomous vehicles arrive in the long term. On the other side, autonomous manufacturers and practitioners are making overly optimistic assumptions about traffic systems and street/highway designs that would be compatible with autonomous vehicles. If cities are looking for relief by reducing the size and developing alternate plans for their infrastructures, alternate planning and design for a fully autonomous era will provide the downsizing opportunity and a new way to deal with infrastructure delivery and associated liabilities.  This presentation provides initial and short-term planning, operation, maintenance, and design principles on how to reduce infrastructure size, maintain the current systems on a different scale, and anticipated changes in geometric design changes. It will also highlight reviews of some fundamental street planning and highway design changes that are only applicable to fully autonomous fleets which are expected beyond 2060 or 2075. At the same time, smaller applications such as trial streets/corridors, building a pilot city, or testing complex may need detailed mobility plans and design changes for fully autonomous mobility including transit automation and guided shared vehicle systems. The objective is to provide sensible mobility planning and design changes that benefit people instead of additional and unaffordable infrastructures for another vehicle technology.