Blythe & Rural Automated Vehicles Operations (BRAVO)

Partners

Study background

Shared public transport services are seen as a central pillar of achieving connectivity goals due to their inherent capability to provide for high volumes of journeys while taking relatively little space.

However, traditional public transport services are less frequently actually, or perceived to be, capable of providing the same level of utility, convenience, reliability, comfort, safety and value for money as members of the public feel the increasingly ubiquitous private car offers them, undermining the ability of transport operators to deliver services, and municipalities to realise the place-making benefits of public transport.

Automated transport has for many years promised to offer a step change to mobility. Within public transport that step change is most commonly applied to the delivery of shared public bus/shuttle services. In short, the ambition is to be able to reduce operational costs allowing for increased investment in overcoming the well understood reasons why people do not readily use buses today: frequency; density; reliability; and safety.

Study approach

To arrive at an assessment of feasibility – whether a future CAM system can deliver a service that shifts the dial on four foundational pillars of public transport, namely Safety, Reliability, Affordability and Accessibility – this study addressed three questions:

  • What “Needs to be True” for this service to be considered feasible?

  • Where are we today?

  • What are the gaps (if any), that the consortium and or the wider CAM ecosystem needs to focus on to realise the feasibility of this (or similar) use-case?

The study proposed six umbrella statements that are reasonably expected as ‘needing to be true’, these statements acted as Lines of Enquiry.

Within the analysis two separate focuses were used – that of the user, and that of the technology.

Study route

This study focused on a route that is considered a link that would likely be considered commercially unviable due to projected ridership, yet highly desirable for future introduction due to its potential replicability across national use cases.

Approximately 8 miles south of The Hub is Blythe Valley Park (BVP), a commercial centre home to over 25 businesses with a combined workforce of c.3,500 employees. In addition, the Park is approaching completion of 750 new homes. Similar to many ‘out of town’ business park developments across the country BVP is relatively isolated, it’s primary means of connectivity being road - nationally the M42 and locally the A34. The direct route linking the Hub and BVP, the focus of this study, utilises a short 'junction hop' length of the Strategic Road Network – the M42, as well as public and private roads at the beginning and end of the route.

Key findings

Over-coming the primary reasons for increasingly more travellers abandoning or ignoring road-based public transport must be the starting point for any future CAM service.

Having started by defining the parameters against which public transport must improve (Safety, Reliability, Affordability, Accessibility), the study undertook a systematic and detailed analysis of user requirements and operational demands across:

  • User trust safety and acceptance

  • System safety

  • Infrastructure

  • Reliability

  • Access for everyone

  • Economics

Within this scope the following conclusions have been established:

  • A Connected and Automated Mobility service implemented in the medium term i.e. by 2030 is not at this time feasible on the high-speed route the study was undertaken on

The inability to offer any level of priority or segregation to a service on this route.

Report is available in the following link