COVID-19 to Cause Major Shifts in ITS Priorities, from Consumer Mobility to Autonomous Urban Freight

Huge drops in personal mobility for both private and public transportation are resulting in huge and immediate decreases or even the disappearance of congestion, road fatalities, and air pollution, which hitherto were the top three concerns of city governments across the globe. It is important to mention the combined number of global fatalities due to road accidents and air pollution exceeds 8 million on a yearly basis. While it is still unclear how much this number will decrease due to COVID-19 in the next year or so, even a modest decrease of 10% might compensate for the number of victims directly claimed by the pandemic to the tune of 800,000, which would definitely be more than just a silver lining on a very black cloud. It also has to be stated that severe economic recession will claim its own share of victims over and beyond the direct deaths due to COVID-19 in the form of lack of food and basic healthcare in the poorest regions of the world. 

However, the more important question is how big the lasting impact of COVID-19 will be on the trends outlined above. In order to try to quantify this, up to five factors need to be taken into account:

• Very slow recovery toward normality extending deep into 2021 will keep traffic levels down for many years to come
• Similar to the terrorist attacks in the first decade of the twenty-first century, certain precautions in terms of social distancing will become permanent, in turn keeping mobility levels below pre-COVID levels
• Consumer habits developed during COVID-19 becoming engrained in permanent digital lifestyles
• Corporations and governments maintaining cost savings related to remote working, eGovernment, eHealth, etc.
• Governments stimulating or even subsidizing a continued digital lifestyle as a form of emergency mitigation policies

The extent to which the above factors will materialize will depend on geographical, cultural, and political differences, but at this point it seems plausible to assume a lasting, permanent drop in traffic levels of between 10% and 20%. While this seems small, it will be enough to permanently remove the worse consequences of congestion, road safety hazards, and air quality problems. As a consequence, these issues will receive less focus from city governments and drop to lower ranks on the list of top priority urban challenges. In turn, this could even postpone some of the vehicle electrification agendas of those cities impacted most by pre-COVID pollution levels.

e-Commerce was already growing strongly before COVID-19, but clearly the pandemic is causing a step change in the levels of last-mile delivery. If anything, COVID-19 has exposed the limitations of traditional van-type delivery, both in terms of available vehicles and drivers, next to more general supply chain constraints, leaving many citizens across the globe no choice other than to continue hazardous physical food shopping.

Clearly, various forms of autonomous delivery will be required, from driverless vehicles to sidewalk robots and drones or combinations of these. This is needed not only to cope with the expected post-COVID accelerated growth in e-commerce but also, and more importantly, to be prepared for the next emergency situation. Whatever the nature of the next catastrophe will be, the versality of mobile robotic assets is such they can be deployed for a large number of known and unknown use cases and guarantee their use for emergency response modes ranging from surveillance to communication, delivery, reconnaissance, operation in contaminated or flooded areas, and the evacuation of victims.

Cities and corporations alike need to invest in these autonomous assets as a top resilience strategy priority. Governments urgently need to put the necessary regulatory and legislative frameworks in place to avoid some of the war-like improvised exemptions hastily allowed in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

So, what does this mean for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in terms of investments in ETC (especially for urban emission zones), sophisticated traffic management technologies like Green Light Optimized Speed Advisory (GLOSA), Road Use Charging (RUC), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) deployments, and pedestrian detection and alert technologies?

Our take on this is that COVID-19 will accelerate the demise of legacy consumer-focused ITS approaches based on tolling and manual traffic management in favor of technologies enabling driverless and autonomous urban freight.

COVID-19 might turn out to become a key driver for the adoption of driverless (commercial) vehicles and other forms of mobile robotics, a very welcome incentive for a driverless automotive industry that was running out of breath at the end of the previous decade.

ITS technologies will still be required but will become increasingly centered on enabling driverless freight on the road and in the air. Key technology use cases will include remote monitoring and control of autonomous assets, requiring low-latency wireless communication, automated emergency response management in the case of accidents, priority management, remotely imposed and controlled routing and navigation, and edge cloud analytics. Adapting public space to accommodate autonomous freight will also be critical in terms of dedicated lanes and sidewalls, drop-off facilities, and wireless recharging.

All of this does not mean consumer mobility will completely disappear into the background, but the freight dimension will dominate. Mixed mode driverless vehicles suited for the transportation of both people and goods will also become more prominent, allowing the repurposing of more assets for freight transportation during emergency situations. Modular, repurposable assets will become the norm.

ITS vendors and ecosystem participants are facing important choices in terms of how to transform their decade old approaches and business models. The most agile ones will be in a good position to take full advantage of the new post-COVID reality.