Lisbon is in fashion and welcomes more tourists every day. This wave has transformed the city: there are more and more houses for temporary rent, the house prices has rose exponentially leaving only an older population to live in the city centre. But Lisbon is a mobility challenge for the locals with some locomotion difficulty; city with 7 hills, with steep and narrow streets, a very special stone on most sidewalks or no sidewalks at all or even full of incorrectly parked cars.
Imagine transporting an elderly person to the city centre. The driver will stop close to the destination, leave the vehicle and help the person getting into the house. Let’s imagine the same scenario with a AV. Here, we can have some issues:
(1) Who’s going to help the person with disability leaving the autonomous taxi? Could we have a ride-sharing dedicated service, where the taxi driver leaves his/her function of driving and becomes a host?
(2) No driver has problems overtaking a vehicle that is stopped on the road, ever if it’s breaking some rules, but will the AV capable of doing that?
(3) Stop in the middle of the road, causing congestion, can be accepted in critical situations like the one described, that leads to some social compensation. But this is common practice and sometimes with meaningless justifications like waiting for someone or “being right back” when there is a parking spot in 10 m. Will the AV capable of differentiate the level of necessity and acceptance of certain situations?
The future of the central areas, currently with higher parking pressure, can go through not having any areas dedicated to parking on the surface. These lanes could be reserved to drop off passengers or cargo vehicles (avoiding jeopardizing the surrounding traffic, stopping with the four indicators in the middle of the road). Perhaps you can even think of a coexistence area with pedestrians in which you can maximize the use of soil.