ParkShuttle II: Review of the Antibes Experiment

In many urban environments, the use of private automobile has led to severe problems with respect to congestion, energy (dependency on oil resources), pollution, noise, safety and general degradation of the quality of life. Therefore, city centres are facing severe problems, traditional commerce in them declines, moving to the periphery, and they become less attractive to visitors and businesses. Although public transport systems have seen many recent improvements (mostly due to information technologies), in many cases the private car still offers a much better service at the individual level. This leads to a constant increase in its use, hence to non-sustainable development of urban transport. An innovative approach for mobility, emerging now as an alternative generic solution to the private passenger car, offers the same flexibility and much less nuisances: small automated vehicles that form part of the public transport system and complement mass transit and non-motorized transport, providing passenger service for any location at any time. These vehicles were developed during the 1990's are now called cybercars and, under the control of a management centre, they form a transportation system called Cybernetic Transport System or CTS. The first CTS was put in operation at Schiphol airport (Amsterdam) in December 1997. In 2001, the European Commission funded two projects. One, called CyberCar, was aimed at the improvement of the technology necessary to implement and run such a CTS and was funded under the transport and tourism key action of DG INFSO research programme. The second, CyberMove, was aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of CTS in present urban environments and was funded under the City of Tomorrow key action of DG TREN research programme. Both programmes ended in 2004.