Urban transportation in the next few decades will shift worldwide toward electrification and automation, with the final aim of increasing energy efficiency and safety for passengers. Such a big change requires strong collaboration and efforts among public administration, research and stakeholders in developing, testing and promoting these technologies in public transportation. Working in this direction, this work provides a review of the impact of the introduction of driverless electric minibuses, for the first and last mile transportation, in public service. More specifically, this paper covers the state of the art in terms of technological background for automation, energy efficiency via electrification and the current state of the legal framework in Europe with a focus on the Baltic Sea Region.

Urban transportation in the next few decades will shift worldwide towards electrification and automation, with the final aim of increasing energy efficiency and safety for passengers. Such a big change requires strong collaboration and efforts among public administration, research and stakeholders in developing, testing and promoting these technologies in the public transportation. Working in this direction, in the present work the impact of the introduction of driverless electric minibuses, for the first and last mile transportation, in the public service is studied. More specifically, this paper covers a state of the art in terms of technological background for automation, energy efficiency via electrification, and the current state of the legal framework in Europe with focus on the Baltic Sea Region.

Urban transportation in the next few decades will shift worldwide towards electrification and automation, with the final aim of increasing energy efficiency and safety for passengers. Such a big change requires strong collaboration and efforts among public administration, research and stakeholders in developing, testing and promoting these technologies in the public transportation. Working in this direction, in the present work the impact of the introduction of driverless electric minibuses, for the first and last mile transportation, in the public service is studied. More specifically, this paper covers a state of the art in terms of technological background for automation, energy efficiency via electrification, and the current state of the legal framework in Europe with focus on the Baltic Sea Region.

Autonomous solutions for transportation are emerging worldwide, and one of the sectors that will benefit the most from these solutions is the public transport by shifting toward the new paradigm of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Densely populated areas cannot afford an increase in individual transportation due to space limitation, congestion, and pollution.Working towards more effective and inclusive mobility in public areas, this paper compares user experiences of autonomous public transport across Baltic countries, with the final goal of gaining an increased insight into public needs. User experience was evaluated through questionnaires gathered along pilot projects implementing a public transportation line, using an automated electric minibus between 2018 and 2019. To have sufficient diversity in the data, the pilot projects were implemented in several cities in the Baltic Sea Area. The data analysed in this paper specifically refer to the cities of Helsinki (Finland), Tallinn (Estonia), Kongsberg (Norway), and Gdańsk (Poland).Across all cities, passengers provided remarkably positive feedback regarding personal security and safety onboard. The overall feedback, which was very positive in general, showed statistically significant differences across the groups of cities (Kongsberg, Helsinki, Tallinn and Gdansk), partially explicable by the differences in the route design. In addition, across all cities and feedback topics, males gave a lower score compared to females. The overall rating suggests that there is a demand for future last-mile automated services that could be integrated with the MaaS concept, although demand changes according to socio-economic and location-based conditions across different countries.

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