Reaching the final stop on the road to SPACE: join UITP for the Final Conference

It was UITP’s own mission to SPACE, or to ‘Shared Personalised Automated Connected vEhicles’. Launched in 2018, the SPACE project aimed to place public transport at the centre of the automated vehicles (AVs) revolution.

Because the arrival of automated vehicles represents a unique opportunity for a fundamental change in urban mobility and more sustainable cities, but only if they are integrated into an effective public transport network.

Yet, before AVs will freely roam our streets, there are still questions to be answered. How can AVs best be integrated into the public transport network? Besides buying the vehicles, what steps must public transport operators and authorities take when planning for AVs? And what will be the impact of AVs on business models, human resources, passenger experience and urban space?

By gathering over 50 partners from the entire urban mobility sector, SPACE set on a three-year mission to answer these questions.

Among other things, a roadmap was created on how to reach the scenario where fleets of shared AVs are integrated into public transport. Another result coming from SPACE is the high-level reference architecture, aiming to ensuring a seamless integration of driverless vehicles with other IT systems in the mobility ecosystem.

Interested to hear more? On 30 September, the SPACE partners are happy to welcome you to the Final Conference! Held both physically and virtually, members of the consortium will present key insights from the project.

For more info on the Final Event and to register, click here.

Recognising the possibilities AVs can offer to advance our cities, many initiatives on automated mobility have recently kicked off on European and international level.

In January 2020 UITP was thrilled to launch SHOW: coordinated by UITP and gathering 70 partners, it is the largest EU initiative on automated mobility to date. The project will deploy fleets of AVs throughout 13 countries in Europe, where they will be tested in real life, in real environments.

UITP is also a proud member of the new European Partnership on Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility (CCAM), which kicked off in June this year. This new partnership wants to promote and facilitate pre-competitive research in the CCAM field within the European Research Area, by bringing together the different actors of the CCAM value chain.

Within the Partnership, UITP co-leads the Cluster “Large scale demonstrations”, which aims at testing and demonstrating the benefits and impacts of CCAM.

After the SPACE Final Conference, the SHOW project organises its second Pan-European Workshop (On 30 September (11.30am – 4.30pm CET), where the CCAM comes together to discuss the path to take to reach a meaningful, sustainable and feasible CCAM in Europe. More info here.