Public transport (PT) accessibility in sparsely populated Euro-MED areas is often poor or non-existent. This leads to 40,6 million people in Euro-MED that are either poorly connected with social networks and basic services (education, medical service, commerce, culture, etc.) or heavily depending on private cars to access them, resulting in high carbon emissions or inaccessibility to public services and labor market. Consequently, these areas are expensive for Public Transport Authorities (PTAs) to operate due to low number of paying passengers per kilometer and high operating costs required to sustain good service frequency and area coverage.

A solution recognized by researchers and pilot projects in Europe is autonomous mobility on demand (AMOD), offering higher quality services while reducing operating costs and CO2 emissions up to 72%. However, it is difficult for PTAs to start planning AMOD without the ability to easily estimate its potential socio- economic and environmental impact.

The AVENUE (H2020) and MultiDEPART (EIT UM) projects successfully developed methodologies to assess local impact of AMOD. ArtMED will enable PTAs to plan for AMOD by transferring methodologies from École Centrale de Lyon and CARNET to 4 PTAs in Slovenia (PO), Portugal (TML), Italy (ALOT), Greece (PF) and beyond through jointly optimising and implementing a publicly accessible AMOD impact assessment tool in a transnational approach.

The tool will support PTAs in ArtMED to analyze the potential AMOD impact for local use cases and develop: 4 vision statements (for political support), 4 investment plans (for budgeting) and 2 transport model designs (for planning AMOD systems).

As AMOD hardly exists yet in Euro-MED, ArtMED is the first project to make state-of-the-art insights available to PTAs through a user-friendly tool, that assesses AMOD impact to plan for more accessible, inclusive, and sustainable public transport for people in sparsely populated areas.