Abstract
Automation carries paradigm-shifting potential for urban transport and has critical sustainability dimensions for the future of our cities. This paper examines the diverse environmental and energy-related dimensions of automated mobility in the city level by reviewing an emerging and increasingly diversified volume of literature for road, rail, water and air passenger transport. The multimodal nature of this investigation provides the opportunity for a novel contribution that adds value to the literature in four distinctive ways. It reviews from a sustainability angle the state of the art underpinning the transition to a paradigm of automated mobility, identifies current knowledge gaps highlighting the scarcity of non-technical research outside the autonomous car’s realm, articulates future directions for research and policy development and proposes a conceptual model that contextualises the nexus of automation-connectivity-electrification-sharing-multimodality as the only way forward for vehicle automation to reach its pro-environmental and resource-saving potential.