The need for balanced policies integrating autonomous vehicles in cities

Smart Cities become a phenomenon that is strongly linked to people and their quality of life, technologies, data, information and automation. All these will be present in future transportation that is expected to be connected and automated. While advances in vehicle automation can make cities smarter, safer, cleaner, or more energy efficient, it can also make traffic management increasingly more complicated. As a result, current traffic management tools and policies may become inefficient. Since we already experience systematic growth in Smart City technology around the world, new sets of rules and policies to protect cities and their citizens in the emerging digital and automated era must be developed and enforced. Solutions such as automated driving introduce new challenges and opportunities for climate change mitigation and improvement of traffic conditions in densely urbanized city centers. There are different approaches to integrate autonomous vehicles and their novel functionalities into the traffic management. In this paper we demonstrate such functionalities and their impact on different traffic and environmental parameters based on traffic microscopic simulation adopted to such connected functionality. The results clearly show the need to carefully and individually analyze and prioritize the impact of the CAVs functionalities for each city and each traffic situation individually, as they might have contradictory effects on traffic. The key performance indicators must be defined and the functionalities carefully integrated into the existing traffic management. This is true for the mixed traffic during the early introduction of CAVs in cities even more.