Connected and automated mobility

Note: this study is currently paused.

Automation and connectivity present significant opportunities for delivering improvements to road safety, reducing congestion, improving reliability and accessibility of transport services, and increasing productivity. The way we plan, operate and maintain our infrastructure is crucial to realising these benefits and addressing any challenges and risks.

The Commission’s study aimed to make recommendations on the interventions that may be required on the road network – and across other types of infrastructure – to pursue a pathway towards more widespread adoption and the desired benefits.

The study focused on the policy and governance that may be needed to effect any necessary changes, while reflecting the uncertainty about technological development. The work covered both physical and digital infrastructure (including data).

The previous government’s terms of reference for the study can be found in the tab on the left hand side of this page. The study did not re-consider the legislative, legal and regulatory requirements for the adoption of CAM already established by government, nor how changes affecting vehicle production or service provision fit into the UK’s industrial strategy.

As with all its policy activity, the Commission has engage with stakeholders as part of the study and sought relevant evidence and insights. A call for evidence was ran during the spring of 2024 and the Commission is grateful to all the organisations which responded.

In August 2022 the UK government set out that by 2025 the UK will begin to see deployments of self-driving vehicles, improving the way in which people and goods are moved around the nation and creating an early commercial market for the technologies.¹ Through the measures proposed in the Automated Vehicles Bill, the Government aims to ensure this market will be enabled by a comprehensive regulatory, legislative and safety framework

Across transport, technology is revolutionising how people and goods move around the country. Automation and connectivity are central to this and present significant opportunities for delivering improvements to road safety, reducing congestion, improving reliability and accessibility of transport services, and increasing productivity. The way we plan, operate and maintain our infrastructure is crucial to realising these benefits. Uncertainty is inherent in any emerging technology. However, uncertainty should not be a reason to do nothing, as to do so may result in missed opportunities to realise strategic objectives. Moreover, many of the actions taken to support self-driving vehicles will have benefits for many existing vehicles, which may further support the case for action.

The focus of the study should therefore be to consider the incremental steps and interventions that may be required on the road network to pursue a pathway towards more wide-spread adoption and the desired benefits. This would form the basis of an adaptive strategy, exploring what additional policy and infrastructure requirements may be needed beyond the initial regulatory, safety and legislative framework already being developed by government to achieve its 2025 vision for CAM. In making its recommendations the government asks the Commission to consider:

• The additional policy, governance and infrastructure that may be needed to realise a range of benefits, reflecting the uncertainty about technological development. Both physical and digital infrastructure (including data) should be considered, alongside network management, operations and how policies and recommendations could be implemented.
• The potential use for private cars, taxis and private hire vehicles as the primary focus, but use cases and infrastructure needs associated with public transport and freight and logistics should also be included. The study should also differentiate between road types and urban, interurban and rural contexts as appropriate.
• The costs, benefits, any associated risks and dependencies of different infrastructure requirements including where these and to whom the costs may fall, and benefits accrue. In doing so the Commission should be mindful of their objectives as well as the potential implications for national security, equality, diversity and inclusion within the transport system.
• Benefits to conventionally driven or unconnected vehicles as well as those that are connected and self-driving; and benefits that can be realised in the near-term as well as when new technologies are widely deployed.
• Sequencing and prioritisation of interventions, and the extent to which they are robust to uncertainty.

The Commission’s remit extends to economic infrastructure within the UK government’s competence and the study should be undertaken in line with this.

In carrying out the work the Commission will not re-consider the legislative, legal and regulatory requirements for the adoption of CAM already established by government, nor how changes affecting vehicle production or service provision fit into the UK’s industrial strategy. The Commission will acknowledge any technical challenges facing CAM technologies, but it is not the role of this study to consider how to resolve them except insofar as it is relevant to its infrastructure remit.

Any recommendations made must consider the need to achieve the country’s net zero target by 2050 and be consistent with the fiscal and economic remits provided to the National Infrastructure Commission.

The Commission should work with other government bodies, such as Centre for Connected and Automated Vehicles, the Department for Transport and National Highways and engage extensively with stakeholders through the study. The Commission should work with these partners to ensure that its findings can inform the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS3).

The study should provide a final report in around twelve months and an interim report in Summer of 2024.

Questions

The Commission is seeking evidence in five areas. The bullet points underneath the questions are intended as prompts for issues and areas that you may want to consider in your response to the main question, rather than separate questions to answer individually. The Commission does not expect all respondents to answer every question, and would encourage those with a particular interest in only some of the areas to focus their response on those questions. If you are able to share any work on relevant uptake/rollout scenarios, we would welcome being made aware of these as part of your answers.

Freight

• What opportunities and risks could self-driving vehicles present for freight and logistics?

Areas you may wish to cover in your response include:

• To what extent do self-driving vehicles for freight provide an opportunity for cost savings for retail and business customers?
• How do the opportunities and risks vary between urban and interurban environments?
• Are there any barriers to realising the benefits – for example around how customers would interact with automated deliveries – and how could these be addressed?

Personal mobility – for individuals and small household-sized groups

• What are the opportunities and risks that privately owned or individually leased (e.g. as part of a carb club type arrangement) self-driving vehicles, and self-driving ride-hailing or ride-pooling services (taxi type), could bring to households and to wider society?
• What are the different trajectories for uptake and which do you think is most likely?

Areas you may wish to cover in your response include:

• To what extent do you anticipate a shift from the private ownership model of vehicles to the Mobility as a Service model, which makes more use of shared and public transport services alongside active travel?
• How do you expect the cost of self-driving vehicles – both the upfront cost and ongoing maintenance costs – to change over time?
• How might uptake and impacts vary across different geographic areas?
• How would the widespread adoption of self-driving vehicles be expected to affect congestion in urban areas?
• How would active travel and public health be affected by the widespread adoption of self-driving vehicles?

Public Transport

• What are the opportunities and risks for public transport from self-driving vehicles?

Areas you may wish to cover in your response include:

• What new public transport services could automation or connectivity enable, for example in rural areas or disconnected neighbourhoods?
• What is the scope for self-driving vehicles to reduce the costs of public transport services and enhance their attractiveness?
• How might the availability of self-driving vehicles for personal mobility (see section above), affect demand for public transport?
• To what extent could revenues from public transport and service levels be affected by uptake of these technologies within and beyond the public transport sector?
• Are there any interventions that may be needed to ensure affordable public transport, or ride-sharing / ride-pooling options, remain available?

Infrastructure for optimisation of usage

• Self-driving vehicles are expected by the legal framework to operate with existing road conditions and current levels of digital connectivity. But are there specific interventions in relation to physical highway infrastructure and/or digital connectivity that could enable greater benefits from the use of self-driving vehicles on urban or interurban roads?

Areas you may wish to cover in your response include:

• Is there a case for dedicated lanes or other segregation of self-driving vehicles, on interurban or urban roads, to help traffic flow and reduce congestion?
• How will self-driving vehicles interact with fleet decarbonisation (e.g. charging) infrastructure?
• Are there any interventions required to maximise the possible benefits that vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure, and vehicle-to-cloud connectivity could provide?
• If there is a widespread adoption of self-driving vehicles, to what extent will the provision of mobile connectivity to meet the demand for data – both from people in vehicles and the vehicles themselves – be a concern?
• How will vehicles that don’t have connected or self-driving capabilities benefit or otherwise be affected by infrastructure change designed to support those that do?

General

• We are interested in the impacts that self-driving vehicles could have on different groups in society, including those with protected characteristics recognised by equalities legislation.² To what extent could they help address existing inequalities and improve transport inclusion, including for people who are unable to drive due to a disability or age?
• Are there any issues around personal safety to consider?
• How will impacts vary across different income groups?
• Are there other interventions necessary to enable and maximise benefits? 
• Are the benefits that may be secured from autonomy and connectivity inevitably intertwined or could they be separated?
• Are connected rather than automated features more important for some use cases?
• Are policy and infrastructure interventions the same for optimising connectivity and automated benefits?
• What effect might the adoption of self-driving vehicles have on carbon emissions from the transport sector?
• What additional measures might be required to ensure that they contribute to meeting emissions targets for 2035 and 2050?

A note on language

The title for this study is ‘Connected and automated mobility’. The Commission is following the government in understanding this phrase to refer to the broad set of vehicle technologies that can be used in wheeled (non-rail), ground-based vehicles.³

The ability of a vehicle to drive itself is a specific application of connected and automated mobility technologies. The Commission takes the government’s definition of a ‘self-driving vehicle’ as one that has at least one self-driving feature, delivering sufficiently high levels of automation that it meets a legally defined threshold and is capable of safely driving itself with no human input. The Automated Vehicles Bill is introducing a legal definition of self-driving vehicles on this basis.⁴
The Society of Automotive Engineers International has established six levels of driving automation.⁵ Self-driving vehicles as defined above refer to vehicles with levels three to five capability. This is therefore a narrower term than ‘automated vehicle’, which can refer to technologies (levels one and two) which are not capable of self-driving.⁶
When referring to self-driving vehicles above, the Commission assumes that these will also be connected vehicles. A connected vehicle is one that uses any of a number of different communication technologies to communicate with the driver, other vehicles on the road, roadside infrastructure and to other systems and services via the cloud.
While the focus of the Commission’s study is on self-driving vehicles, the Commission is also interested in the benefits that vehicle and roadside connectivity could bring separately or in addition to any role in supporting the operation of self-driving vehicles.

How to respond

Please provide sources and references, examples, data and evidence to support your response. We encourage responses to be as succinct as possible and to be no longer than six pages in total (not including supplementary supporting evidence, which should be provided in an annex if required).
Responses should be sent to CAMStudy@nic.gov.uk by the end of Monday 3 June 2024.
Evidence received will be reviewed by the Commission. If further information or clarification of any evidence submitted is required, the Commission Secretariat will contact the evidence provider.
The Commission is not planning to accept responses to the call for evidence in hard copy. Please contact the Commission by the email address above if this poses a problem for your response. Representative groups responding to this call for evidence are asked to give a summary of the people and organisations they represent and, where relevant, who else they have consulted in reaching their conclusions when they respond.

FoI and privacy statements

There may be occasions when the Commission will share the information you provide, including any personal data, with external analysts. This is for the purposes of call for evidence response analysis only. The Commission’s privacy policy can be found here.
We may also publish any responses received to this call for evidence, excluding personal data. However, information provided in response to this call for evidence, including personal information, may be subject to publication or disclosure in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) or other relevant legislation.
If you want information that you provide to be treated as confidential, please be aware that, under the FOIA, there is a statutory code of practice with which public authorities must comply and which deals, amongst other things, with obligations of confidentiality. In view of this, it would be helpful if you could explain to the Commission why you regard the information you have provided as confidential. If the Commission receives a request for disclosure of the information, it will take full account of your explanation, but cannot give an assurance that confidentiality can be maintained in all circumstances. An automatic confidentiality disclaimer generated by your IT system will not, of itself, be regarded as binding on the Commission. The Commission is subject to legal duties which may require the release of information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or any other applicable legislation or codes of practice governing access to information.