MERGE Greenwich
An autonomous future
Merge Greenwich was a part-Innovate UK funded research project, looking into the feasibility of autonomous ride-sharing services in Greenwich. The project was led by Addison Lee and included project partners Ford, Transport System Catapult, Transport Research Laboratory, Immense Simulations and DG Cities.
“AVs will be widely beneficial for society.”
The role of DG Cities
DG Cities worked on determining the customer offer of the service and helped to define the operating model in terms of required infrastructure and the integration of the service with public transport.
Further, we undertook a public consultation survey to understand people’s attitudes towards CAVs and ride sharing services.
The project proved that ride-sharing services using autonomous vehicles would be a feasible business proposition as they could provide a cost efficient transport mode in certain instances. The analysis also showed that large vehicles set up for ride-sharing might not always be the most efficient as their utilisation would be largely dependent on travel peaks. A mix of vehicles serving an area are likely to be the most beneficial.
The insights DG Cities have collected through public outreach have since been used as a benchmark for other studies we are managing in this topic, providing a longitudinal dataset of public attitude. An interesting finding was that many participants felt more secure about the vehicles than others they’d be sharing vehicles with. Acceptance of CAVs as a technology was quite high even in older populations.
Why is this work important?
The viability and use cases of AVs are still unknown, especially when we consider overall city and citizen benefits as well as commercial feasibility. Our work on the MERGE Greenwich project focused on defining and validating services that would help solve existing mobility challenges in cities, demonstrating that AVs will be widely beneficial for society. Working alongside commercial operators has helped us define new dial-a-ride type services and shared minibus operations that could be both profitable to run as well as be more attractive to passengers due to improved reliability and cheaper costs.
Collaborations like this will be necessary in the future to bring forward real transport issues cities or neighbourhoods face and link them up with commercial mobility service solutions that can solve them.
“The project proved that ride-sharing services using autonomous vehicles would be a feasible business proposition.”