An overview of the scientific production on the application of AI in public transport.

This research aims to provide an overview of the scientific production on the application of AI in public transport, its thematic evolution, and emerging research niches and trends, to serve as a reference for future work by researchers and practitioners. To this end, a bibliometric analysis of all scientific production in the two major international databases, Web of Science and Scopus, was carried out. The present analysis comprises the most extensive study on the application of AI in public transport. The results show that AI applications are more prevalent in private vehicles than in public transport. Hence, future work has major challenges to address in order to delve into thematic niches within each transportation system.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Estimating the potential for shared autonomous scooters

Recent technological developments have shown significant potential for transforming urban mobility. Considering first- and last-mile travel and short trips, the rapid adoption of dockless bike-share systems showed the possibility of disruptive change, while simultaneously presenting new challenges, such as fleet management or the use of public spaces. In this paper, we evaluate the operational characteristics of a new class of shared vehicles that are being actively developed in the industry: scooters with self-repositioning capabilities. We do this by adapting the methodology of shareability networks to a large-scale dataset of dockless bike-share usage, giving us estimates of ideal fleet size under varying assumptions of fleet operations. We show that the availability of self-repositioning capabilities can help achieve up to 10 times higher utilization of vehicles than possible in current bike-share systems. We show that actual benefits will highly depend on the availability of dedicated infrastructure, a key issue for scooter and bicycle use. Based on our results, we envision that technological advances can present an opportunity to rethink urban infrastructures and how transportation can be effectively organized in cities