Research Projects

Since 2000 several research projects have been conducted, both in the EU and the USA, with the deliverables being published through the respective websites. Member of ATRA have been actively involved in the different studies, with summaries of the publications included below for reference to the work undertaken in the projects.

Year	Research	Paper Title
2011	Niches	The mission of NICHES+ is to promote innovative measures for making urban transport more efficient and sustainable and to move them from their current “niche” position into a mainstream urban transport application.
2008	Citymobil	The problems of mobility in cities are clear. However, the possible solutions are still in their infancy. A shift from the private automobile to a multi-modal approach is the prefered trend. Society must recognise the need for both high speed scheduled mass transport as well as individualised on-demand short distance transport.
2007	New Jersey PRT Study	The following report was prepared for the New Jersey Legislature to document the current state of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) development and implementation and to explore the potential viability of implementing PRT in New Jersey.
2005	Netmobil	NETMOBIL is an EU, DG Research, sponsored cluster project supporting R&D and demonstration in innovative personal urban transportation systems. The objectives are contained within the mission statement: ‘To explore and promote the potential of developments in automatic vehicle technologies for future sustainable personal urban transportation systems, and provide advice and guidance on the options for decision makers’.
2004	Edict	The EDICT cities evaluated Personal Rapid Transit as an innovative and sustainable transport solution to the private car, that addresses the problems of congestion, poor air quality and social exclusion in cities, and which complements existing forms of public transport. From the user’s perspective, PRT offers fundamental benefits over existing public transport.
2004	CyberCars	The Project’s main objective was to accelerate the development and the diffusion of this novel transportation system by improving the performances and lowering the cost. Several cities throughout Europe have collaborated with the partners in the Project, studying the potentiality to run such systems, providing their specific constraints and accepting to do some preliminary tests of technologies and demonstrations. A major part of the work involved the improvement and testing of key technologies for better guidance, collision avoidance, energy utilisation and fleet management and the development of simple, standard user interfaces.
2002	Civitas	The CIVITAS Initiative (“City-Vitality-Sustainability”, or “Cleaner and Better Transport in Cities”) was launched in 2002. Its fundamental aim is to support cities to introduce ambitious transport measures and policies towards sustainable urban mobility. The goal of CIVITAS is to achieve a significant shift in the modal split towards sustainable transport, an objective reached through encouraging both innovative technology and policy-based strategies.