Literature Review

2020 for a symposium on connected autonomous vehicles, platooning, ‘the right to the city’ and the environment.

 

1 Background

This literature review supports research being conducted by Colin Polwarth as part of his PhD into fully autonomous vehicles (AVs), the built environment and associated semiotics at the Royal College of Art (RCA). The literature review is associated with the novel online symposium methodology for the PhD; it will be available on the website for the online symposium.

The overall aim for this research is to provide a scholarly, interdisciplinary contribution to the field of AVs, emphasising improved environmental outcomes, safety and public health in the built environment through qualitative research in the fields of architecture, intelligent mobility and communications

The research questions that are being asked by the PhD are:

  1. What are the cultural expectations of vehicle autonomy and what are the social expectations of a fully AV environment? What are industry assumptions regarding AVs? How do social and industry expectations differ?

  2. What would a fully AV environment communication system and semiotic look like? What are the expected effects on built environments from an AV?

  3. Are AVs expected to achieve systemic environmental benefits along with improved safety and communications?

As part of the development of the broader PhD research, a specific area of inquiry related to connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) is considered in this literature review. The CAV is currently regarded in the AV industry as one of the AV systems that is most likely to be deployed in the public realm. It has been presented at the Australian Driverless Autonomous Vehicle Summits in 2017, 2018 and 2019, and through various publications.

Elliott,[1] Keen and Miao[2] (2019) describe CAVS as ‘a transformative technology that has great potential for reducing traffic accidents, enhancing quality-of-life, and improving the efficiency of transportation systems’. Bagloee, Tavana and Asadi (2016) define the terms ‘connected’ or ‘connected vehicle’ as ‘technologies that ensure communication between all contributing agents or stakeholders including pedestrians, authorities and vehicles, as well as infrastructure’.

2 Synopsis

The AV industry, through media[3] presentations, websites[4] and in scholarly articles, makes assertions that CAVs, including autonomous vehicle freight trains[5] on highways or in urban settings, will transfigure peak-hour congestion into a flowing, efficient traffic management system, thereby improving quality of life especially in urban environments.

This project challenges AV industry levels of autonomy through a review of literature, and through research into the cultural and social history of AVs (Chapter 1 of the PhD). A fully AV environment is currently regarded as Level 5,[6] as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).[7] Challenging industry definitions of autonomy is therefore also a challenge to AV industry definitions of safety.[8]


There is a plethora of publications on CAVs, mostly peer-reviewed technical reports on the technology and its technical capabilities and limitations. The technical reports are interrelated; a summary overview of the main sources of data is provided by Elliott, et al. (2019).

Bajpai (2016) suggests that congestion could be alleviated through CAVs, but also states that AV contributions are unknown and that gradual deployment of CAVs in the public arena will determine the impacts; in other words, ‘Let’s try this and see how it works’. This assertion appears to support industry development without consideration of any experiential and environmental conditions the technology may cause, and it appears to be more of same (‘Let’s try it and see what happens) – an evolutionary experimentation that underscores a century of motor vehicle manufacturing.

According to recent publications regarding CAVs, safety improvement is achieved through autonomous driving, namely, the omission of human fault from the driving circumstance (Elliot 2019) and efficiency through connected training or the platooning of vehicles. Platooning (trains of connected vehicles) utilises the principles of swarming and aerodynamics, seen in natural systems to increase efficiency and improve productivity. Nourmohammadzadeh and Hartmann (2016) state that in fossil fuel tests, fuel savings have been achieved through platooning.

Questions arise regarding the impacts of trains of heavy freight vehicles on motorways and roads, and the effects of platooning freight trains on smaller vehicles and active transport users. Considerations of the rights to the city emerge from ideas of swarming, platooning and CAVs due to the potential dominance of commercial vehicles and commodification in the public domain.

2.1 Keywords

Connected autonomous vehicles, platooning, swarming, autonomous freight trains, driverless, rights to the city, swarming, symposium methodology, commodification of the public realm, environmentally sustainable transport, freight trains, smart cities.

3 Literature Review Focus


3.1 Introduction

Broadly, the aesthetics[9] – the combined functional and visual responses – of a future fully autonomous environment are unknown; the impacts of CAVs are unknown. My current research argues that the autonomous renewable energy vehicles (AREV) technology, of which CAVs are a part, should incorporate a systemic ecological[10] paradigm. The AV industry is focused on safety, but questions arise as to how vehicle autonomy and safety is defined by industry. The research asks if the removal of a human driver[11] and the replacement of that driver with advanced AV technology will, in addition to safety improvements, usher in a more ecologically sensitive[12] transport and built environment. Is swarming or platooning technology a naturalistic abstraction, or is this traffic format so foreign to known traffic conditions that it will require deeper consideration and discussion? This review provides an overview of the literature in this field.

4 Literature review methods and methodologies

This literature review adopts a structured assessment method to obtain, observe and assess data, specifically studies on the subject.[13] Watts’ (2019) online training programme provides broad overviews of qualitative methods. Three themes expanded upon in this literature review are:

  1. CAVs (theme: technology, ecology and semiotics)

  2. Environmental framework for AREV (theme: ecology)

  3. Rights to the city (theme: urban framework, ecology and semiotics)

5 Overview of scholarly data

What is a CAV and how is it defined? Murtha (2015) suggests that ‘connected vehicle technologies allow vehicles to communicate with each other and the world around them’. However, the definition lacks critical analysis of the intention and the effects of the technology. According to Bagloee, Tavana and Asadi (2016: 3), ‘the terms “Connected” or “Connected Vehicle” refer to the technologies that ensure communication between all contributing agents or stakeholders including pedestrians, authorities and vehicles, as well as infrastructure’.

Major recent publications on AVs contain limited or no information about the impacts of CAVs. These publications in order of importance include: Schwartz’s (2018) No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future; Mitchell, Borroni-Bird and Burns’ (2010) Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century; and Wolmer’s (2018) Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere.

There are no references to CAVs in the following smart city publications in order of significance: Batty and others’ (2012) Smart Cities of the Future; Verrest and Pfeffer’s (2018) Elaborating the Urbanism in Smart Urbanism: Distilling Relevant Dimensions for a Comprehensive Analysis of Smart City Approaches; and Nikitas and others’ (2017) How Can Autonomous and Connected Vehicles, Electromobility, BRT, Hyperloop, Shared Use Mobility and Mobility-As-A-Service Shape Transport Futures for the Context of Smart Cities? This reveals a contextual weakness in general research, as it would be helpful for the content of the PhD to have other views on the subject on which to base discussion.

All of the aforementioned publications are leading publications in their fields and are interdisciplinary by nature; however, they do not cover CAVs. This gap in the knowledge base in relation to the technology and other disciplines. Uhlemann (2018) states: Autonomous vehicles may be combining data from cameras, onboard sensors, and lidars, they may be intelligent, learning, and adapting to each situation; but, if they are not connected, then they are not very smart. Active safety functions have been taken about as far as they can go. To advance safety further, connectivity is needed. Communications can be seen as a different type of sensor, providing the non-lineof-sight information that radars cannot.

CAVs incorporate a number of sensors that detect the environment through which the vehicle is travelling. The sensor technologies vary between manufacturers; most include vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to infrastructure Literature Review on Connected Autonomous Vehicles and the City by Colin Polwarth RCA APR 2020 Page 6 of 11 (V2I) and vehicle to pedestrian (V2P) technologies to “sense” the environment and utilise computing technologies to drive the vehicle without the involvement of a human driver. [14] ‘cohda wireless’ is arguably the industry leader in CAVs and has made substantive presentations and demonstrations of the technology at the Australian Driverless Vehicle Institute (ADVI) Summit in the years 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. (I attended and experienced the CAV demonstration in 2018.[15])


Elliott, Keen and Miao (2019) have undertaken a comprehensive review on five selected subjects fundamental to technical CAV research: (i) inter-CAV communications; (ii) security of CAVs; (iii) intersection control for CAVs; (iv) collision-free navigation of CAVs; and (v) pedestrian detection and protection. They state (2019): ‘The main focus of the research is to highlight opportunities to reduce traffic incidents especially with pedestrians or cyclists.’ This article provides the most comprehensive scholarly overview of the technical attributes of the main variants of the technology. However, it has no information or insights into the experiential or interface aspects of the CAV on the city, possibly due to the interdisciplinary nature of the research question being posed.

Review articles are available in the literature for CAV-related research. Bagloee, Tavana and Asadi (2016) provide substantive reviews discussing the basic vocabulary and topics pertaining to CAVs in general terms. Deb and others (2018) identify three major gaps in pedestrian research: 1) lack of a pedestrian behaviour questionnaire for CAV research; 2) lack of a validated pedestrian simulator for CAV research; and 3) lack of research investigating pedestrian design suggestions for CAVs. Both centralised and decentralised CAV approaches are discussed, and, within each category, the works are further classified into heuristic[16] control and optimal control, suggesting that more systems and subsystems could be developed.

The research is set in the context of a transport system for an ecologically sustainable future. Capra (1996: 7) states: ‘Deep ecology, in opposition to linear systems, regards human movement, materiality and transportation as a fundamental necessity as part of a cyclical web-like ecological system.’ Capra, in his 2014 work Systems View of Life, [17] provides the overall environmental framework for the discussion of CAVs and their impacts on the built environment. Capra does not discuss specific transportation modalities or their impacts on the environment overall in either of the above publications; however, he makes the point that conceptualising the transport system as part of an ecological future is necessary in order to achieve environmental sustainability.

Rodrigue (2019) states:

‘It is however self-driving trucks that may offer the most significant potential. The long-distance segment uses well-defined highways and stable driving conditions that are prone to automation. In such a setting, trucks are able to coordinate their respective mobility by assembling convoys (or platoons) where each vehicle follows the other closely, improving fuel consumption. Self-driving trucks also have a potential to service repetitive short distance hauls such as between terminals such as ports and rail yards and distribution centers. From a labor standpoint, this has the potential to be highly disruptive since 1.7 million truck drivers were reported alone in the United States in 2015. The introduction of automated trucks is therefore likely to be incremental and route specific. Automated vehicles are already being used at port terminals to move containers between docks and stacking yards. Truck automation creates a paradigm where the long haul is most prone to automation but shows the least potential for electrification due to powertrain requirements.’

Rodrigue does not discuss the experiential aspects of freight trains platooning on roads, nor the spatial or commodification issues associated with rights to the road. Importantly, roads are used by a variety of users and the dominance of one user over another is, I would argue, an issue of rights.

As the industry is promoting the adoption of platooning or CAVs for safety and efficiency, a number of experiential questions arise in relation to impacts on other road users and the city – specifically, rights to the city. Rights to the city were outlined by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville; he suggested a rights framework for urban social struggles. The idea has had convergent and divergent polemics over the past fifty years of discussion on the issue.[18] In relation to CAVs and the interaction of the technology on the city and its people, there are issues associated with potential social struggles, as defined by Lefebvre, concerning residents’ rights to access and use the public realm, specifically the rights around using road space; it is a spatial rights issue.

Subsequent theorists, such as Purcell,[19] policy makers and social movements[20] have attempted to reclaim the city as a place for the people that is separated from, or by necessity subverting, the challenges of commodification and capitalism that are inherent in contemporary Western culture. The dominance of capitalism, our ‘society of consumption’,[21] as a socio-economic force that leads to social inequality has been a theme is worldwide cities for at least 200 years. Lefebvre noted that the governance of urban space is transformed into ‘goods’ or commodity[22]. In rebellion, he recommended urban space be a ‘meeting point for the building of collective life’,[23] importantly, he called for ‘new approaches’[24] to the city as a virtual object. Later, he introduced the idea of ‘transduction’, an intellectual operation, as a simulation of a hypothesis with its theory – a method of rigorous interdisciplinary cognition. To my knowledge, there is a gap in the knowledge base in relation to CAVs and the rights of citizens in the city, this issue of commodification of the public realm through commercial operations is a central issue for action.

Purcell (2002: 108) states: ‘Rather its effect on the social and spatial structure of cities will be determined through and complex and contingent politics, what could best be termed an urban politics of the inhabitant […] So the agenda that inhabitants will pursue cannot be presumed; rather it must be negotiated through a complex politics of scale, identity, and difference, among other struggles.’

6 Conclusion

The theoretical connections drawn together in this literature review of CAV technology, platooning, road freight trains and other road users with rights to the road/land use, and commodification in a broad sense, and environmentalism is a synthesis of research and interdisciplinary epistemology. Purcell (2002: 107) recommends further research into the ‘explicit debate on what the right to the city should entail and on what it might contribute to greater urban democracy’. It is a central idea in discussing the impacts of CAV technology on the public realm, including environmental and experiential impacts. Human rights, in relation to the use of the public realm, the sharing of space and the functionality of space, is discussed as the use of the space is contested by various users and the political class tasked to manage the complexity.

I note that most theorists in this field, such as Lefebvre (1996) and Purcell (2002), rarely discuss the effects of road transportation, and vehicle design generally, on the design, development, planning, spatial use or democratisation of the public realm. Yet, within my practice in road-based architecture, the contested space of the road, the public realm verses the private realm, is a central issue. The usage rights of open space, footpaths, active transport corridors, traffic islands, road lanes and various types of arterial, highway, motorway and designated lane systems along with Intelligent Traffic Management Systems are a daily, contemporary, continual urban praxis focused on balancing the complex needs of the community.

In this discussion, it is worth noting that extraordinarily complex issues arise in relation to road-based traffic, in that a high proportion of citizens who are dependent on vehicular transport to and from the city are the same citizens who depend on freight for the delivery of goods and food. They own private vehicles sharing roads, use footpaths in the city and use the same roads as commercial operators of freight within the city. These are the same citizens who are employed by the companies who manufacture vehicles, manufacture goods and deliver goods, and they are variously pedestrians, disabled persons, the disenfranchised, the economically active and they are also vehicle drivers. These are the same citizens who exercise their rights to movement. We face, in this subject, a deep-seated, complicit and complex democratic rights process.

Returning to the specific research area of CAVs, a number of questions arise in relation to the platooning of trains of freight vehicles on public roads. These have been detailed as research questions in a symposium methodology. The research questions have not been addressed, to my knowledge, in current literature, and this lack of scholarly qualitative research suggests a gap in the knowledge base that has practical social implications.

It is perhaps the rights to the city as a theoretical and ecological construct that will stimulate debate on the future of CAV platooning and swarming, the commodification of the public realm through use patterns such as freight movement. A deeper understanding of the benefits and impacts of technology on the public realm will provide a strong contribution to this field of inquiry. The questions that arise are: do we have ecological rights, rights to health, right to public health, and are these rights to the city? Are the limits of spatial rights associated with ecological rights such as clean water, unpolluted air and virus-free environments? For me, these issues are all interrelated. The environmentally sustainable transport system is also a healthy system, transparent, democratic, publicly beneficial, ethical, efficient, understandable, highly communicative, intelligent and aesthetic.


  1. David Elliott is an industrial engineer at Mahle Filter Systems North America, Inc., Murfreesboro, Tennessee, USA.

  2. Leo Miao is Assistant Professor of Mechatronics Engineering at Middle Tennessee State University. His research interests include control and optimisation for discrete event systems and hybrid systems, with applications to communication networks, wireless networks and cyber-physical systems.

  3. Benjamin Preston (Sun 13 August 2017) Rise of the robocar: are connected cars safer, or a target for hackers? (Guardian) < https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/robot-connected-cars-hacking-risks-driverless-vehicles-ross-now > Accessed on 10 November 2019.

  4. COHDA Wireless < https://cohdawireless.com/ > Accessed on 7 November 2019.

  5. Autonomous vehicle freight trains comprise a series of AV trucks functioning separately but operating together with Cav intelligence. Fossil fuelled vehicle freight trains are used extensively in USA, Australia and in Europe to move high quantity loads of freight. They offer fuel economies and flexibility.

  6. SAE Levels of Autonomy, which are industry accepted definitions, are contained in the Literature Review.

  7. SAE (2018-06-15 revised) Taxonomy and Definitions for Terms Related to Driving Automation Systems for On-Road Motor Vehicles J3016_201806 < https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j3016_201806/ > [accessed 30 March 2019].

  8. Safety is linked to the development of AV technology.

  9. Aesthetics in this proposal is defined as a branch of philosophy that deals with questions of beauty and artistic taste.

  10. Capra (1997) uses the term ‘deep ecology’; however, this could be confused with the 1970s writings of Arne Næss. To avoid confusion, I have selected the simplified definition of ecology as a study of how organisms interact with one another and with their physical environment. The distribution and abundance of organisms on Earth is shaped by both biotic (living-organism-related) and abiotic (the non-living and material).

  11. Human drivers are responsible for the majority of accidents, as stated by the World Health Organization’s Global Status Report on Road Safety 2017.

  12. Jean-Paul Rodrigue (2019) supports this view. He is a scholar of transportation geography from the Université de Montréal (1994) and is part of the Department of Global Studies and Geography at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. In 2019, the Association of American Geographers granted Rodrigue the Edward L. Ullman Award for outstanding contribution to the field of transport geography.

  13. Thematic analysis (TA) is a qualitative method. As Braun (2012: 57) states: ‘TA is a method for systematically identifying, organizing, and offering insights in up to ten patterns of meaning (themes) across a data set. Through focusing on meaning across a data set, TA allows the researcher to see and make sense of collective or shared meanings and experiences. Identifying unique and idiosyncratic meanings and experiences found only within a single data item is not the focus of TA. This method, then, is a way of identifying what is common 10 the way a topic is talked or written about and of making sense of those commonalities.’

  14. For more information on these and other technologies, refer to Cohda Wireless: https://cohdawireless.com/, Volvo https://www.volvocars.com/au/why-volvo/human-innovation/future-of-driving

  15. ADVI Summit 2018, Adelaide SA Cohda Wireress (2019) https://cohdawireless.com/cohda-chosen-for-freight-signal-priorityproject-by-transport-for-nsw/

  16. P.M. Todd. 2001. ‘Heuristics for Decision and Choice’, in Science Direct International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, pp. 6676–6679 < https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B008043076700629X> Heuristics are approximate strategies or ‘rules of thumb’ for decision-making and problem solving that do not guarantee a correct solution but that typically yield a reasonable solution or bring one closer to hand. As such, they stand in contrast to algorithms, which will produce a correct solution given complete and correct inputs. More specifically, heuristics are usually thought of as shortcuts that allow decisions or solutions to be reached more rapidly and in conditions of incomplete or uncertain information – often because they do not process all the available information. Decision heuristics have been studied in different research traditions: one has focused on when and where verbally described heuristics can break down and yield biases, that is, deviations from classical norms of rationality; and another has investigated how specific computationally modelled heuristics can exploit structured information to yield fast and accurate decisions.

  17. Capra, Fritof. 1996. The Web of Life: A New Understanding of Living Systems (USA: Anchor Books, Random House Pty Ltd).

  18. Knut. 2009. ‘Right to the City’ as a response to the crisis: ‘Convergence’ or ‘divergence’ of urban social movements? < https://web.archive.org/web/20120310001029/http://www.reclaiming-spaces.org/crisis/archives/266 > [accessed 9 November 2019].

  19. Purcell, Mark. 2002. Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant. GeoJournal, 58(2–3): 99– 108); and Harvey, David. 2008. ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review, 53. newleftreview.org.

  20. Leavitt, J., Samara, T.R. and Brady, M. 2009. The Right to the City Alliance: Time to Democratize Urban Governance (Planners Network October 2009) < www.plannersnetwork.org..> [accessed 7 October 2019].

  21. Ibid. Lefebvre p.149.

  22. Ibid. Lefebvre p.1451.

  23. ‘el escenario de encuentro para la construcción de la vida colectiva’ in Martínez Lorea, Swing, Capitán (2018) El derecho a la ciudad (Capitán Swing). capitanswing.com (in Spanish). , http://capitanswing.com/libros/el-derecho-a-la-ciudad/ > [accessed 25 October 2019].

  24. Ibid. Lefebvre p.148.

7 Bibliography

Bagloee, S.A., M. Tavana and M. Asadi. 2016. Autonomous vehicles: challenges, opportunities, and future implications for transportation policies (Journal of Modern Transport, 24: 284.) doi:10.1007/s40534-016-0117-3 Online available at: http://link.springer.com/journal/40534 p 3. [accessed on 21 April 2020]

Bajpai, Jitendra N. 2016. Emerging vehicle technologies & the search for urban mobility solutions (Urban, Planning and Transport Research, 4(1): 83-100, DOI: 10.1080/21650020.2016.1185964) < https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21650020.2016.1185964 > [accessed 14 November 2019]

Batty, M., K.W. Axhausen, F. Giannotti, A. Pozdnoukhov, A. Bazzani, M. Wachowicz, G. Ouzounis and Y. Portugali. 2012. Smart Cities of the Future (European Physical Journal Special Topics), 214, 1: 481–518. <https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01703-3 [accessed 17 November 2018]

Bayley, Steven. 2009. Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex Power Motion, Colour, Everything (UK: Conran)

Braun, Virginia. 2012. Thematic Analysis: APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology Vol. 2 (USA: American Psychological Association)

Deb, S., M.M. Rahman, L.J. Strawderman and T. Garrison. 2018. Pedestrians receptivity toward fully automated vehicles: research review and roadmap for future research (IEEE Transactions on Human Machine Systems, 48(3): 279–290)

Elliott, D., W. Keen and L. Miao. 2019. Recent advances in connected and automated vehicles (Journal of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, English Edition 6(2): 109–131)

Knut. 2009. Right to the City as a response to the crisis: Convergence or divergence of urban social movements? < https://web.archive.org/web/20120310001029/http://www.reclaiming-spaces.org/crisis/archives/266 > [accessed 9 November 2019]

Mitchell, W.J., C.E. Borroni-Bird and L.D. Burns. 2010. Reinventing the Automobile Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century (USA: The MIT Press) [accessed 12 May 2019]

Murtha, Suzanne. 2015. Autonomous vs connected vehicles – what’s the difference? (Atkins, Member of the SNC-Lavalin Group) https://www.atkinsglobal.com/en-gb/angles/all-angles/autonomous-vs-connected-vehicleswhats-the-difference < [accessed 9 November 2019]

Nikitas, A., I. Kougias, E. Alyavina and E.N. Tchouamou. 2017. How Can Autonomous and Connected Vehicles, Electromobility, BRT, Hyperloop, Shared Use Mobility and Mobility-As-A-Service Shape Transport Futures for the Context of Smart Cities? (Urban Science) https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/1/4/36 [accessed 9 November 2019]