Factors of the Moscow Urban Environment Changing by Self-driving Cars Introduction

The emergence of self-driving vehicles is a reality for the next decade. Technical and economic issues of self-driving technology are considering around the world. However, the study of the possible impact on the urban environment hardly occurs because of the topic complexity and the strong lobby by technologies producers. The technology of self-driving movement will change the urban environment, and the changes are irreversible, so it is important to have an idea of its implementation impact in order to avoid negative effects and try to get the maximum benefit with self-driving cars introduction. The object of study - urban environment as a combination of factors: technological, economic, social, environmental and political nature. The main goal of this work is to predict changes in the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the urban environment as a result of implementation of self-driving vehicles. In this paper, the methodology to assess the impact of introducing the technology of self-driving movement on the individual factors of the urban environment has been developed based on the scientific and applied literature analysis. Based on the developed methodology, the technology implications effects have been compared for the three scenarios of individualization, collectivization, and the mixed scenario; input assumption is the form of car owning. The result of the study shows that the most positive effect is observed with a significant portion of public self-driving vehicles in the vehicle fleet size. The preferred scenario of self-driving cars implementation is a Mixed scenario that includes the presence of positive influence on some parameters of the urban environment, the availability of alternatives selection of the car owning form and the lack of increased social tension by limiting personal form of car owning. The volume of the qualification work is 90 sheets, 15 figures, 16 tables, 1 Appendix. List of references submitted 69 names.