Project Endeavour
The road to autonomous vehicles
Project Endeavour is an exciting project looking at accelerating and scaling the deployment of autonomous vehicle services in our urban areas, and builds on the successful MERGE Greenwich project.
The project is part-Innovate UK funded and is being delivered by consortium partners DG Cities, Oxbotica, Immense, TRL, BSI and Oxfordshire County Council.
Project Endeavour will deliver multi-location AV pilots on public roads at locations in Oxford, London (Greenwich) and a third UK city. The first pilot in Oxford is now live with and more pilots at the other locations will take place in Summer 2021.
“Transport is the glue that holds our urban areas together and a misguided deployment can be costly both in terms of budget and unintended societal and environmental consequences.”
The role of DG Cities
As part of the project, we are developing a Mobility Service Assessment Framework (MSAF), a guidance tool designed to help transport planners, urban designers and other senior decision makers to design, plan and implement local mobility services.
The framework enables comparison of AV ridesharing services with other mobility services - new and existing - to enable decision makers to better understand the potential impact and relative performance of transport modes. The MSAF consists of 11 KPIs which look at economic, social and environmental factors.
In this way, mobility services and modes can be assessed against each other, city policies and strategic objectives. This provides a data driven methodology to not only compare new transport modes (i.e. AV ridesharing services) but also different offerings of the same service type and can therefore be a useful tool as part of a tender process.
Why is this work important?
Transport is the glue that holds our urban areas together and a misguided deployment can be costly both in terms of budget and unintended societal and environmental consequences. DG Cities believes in helping the public sector to fully understand the implications of an investment, before it is made. In this way, decisions can solve immediate challenges and avoid unintended negative consequences. The data-driven methodology of the framework also provides full visibility into decision making processes.
Our “whole-city” approach to impact and evaluation also means that we take a broader view of potential new services, allowing clients to not only understand the extent to which an investment will meet an immediate need, but how it can also support wider visions and strategies, such as becoming carbon neutral.
“DG Cities believes in helping the public sector to fully understand the implications of an investment, before it is made.”