There is an active contemporary debate about how emerging technologies for automated vehicles might revolutionise individual and collective mobility in cities. As with any socio-technical transition of such importance to both economic prosperity and societal wellbeing, there are critical questions to be posed in terms of how the transition is managed, and how both the benefits and any negative externalities of change will be governed. The state, public institutions, city planners and managers and other participants in the wider arena of public policy need to pro-actively plan for the era of automated vehicles in order to ensure societally-desirable outcomes. To achieve this, a new set of governance challenges – encompassing changing networks of actors, resources and power, new logics of consumption, and shifts in how urban mobility is regulated, priced and taxed – will require to be successfully negotiated. This session will discuss paper the key potential impacts and externalities of the automated mobility to which urban governance will need to respond, and discuss what policy interventions might be appropriate to help manage the transition.
