## 6 Conclusions  
The goal of a future smart city is to have mass and goods mobility primarily supported by an entirely autonomous vehicle system. The goal behind this paper was to critically analyse the state-of-the-art of the research on AVs and ITS transport systems, specifically focused on establishing the research methodologies, main findings and limitations that can be researched in future works.  
A total of 22 primary and 79 supplementary researches on the topic were reviewed from peer-reviewed transport literature. The results show that it is expected that in the next thirty years or so, autonomous vehicles may become a reality on public roads. Research has shown that the benefits of AVs and ITS in terms of insurance, congestion and parking costs are in the range of $2960-3900 per year per vehicle. The research on private autonomous cars concluded with a positive outlook on the SAV mobility if electric/hybrid electric autonomous cars were to be the driving force behind the system.  
The situation of future transport systems is further complicated by the social, environmental, political, and more so, budgetary, constraints of transportation agencies, making sustainability the primary concern. Results of this review paper showed that automated urban mass transit may also be a promising alternative to personalised travel, where users can either subscribe or operate on a pay-as-you-go basis without the need for a driver or attendant for the service operation. The expected benefits of AV-PT are the reduction of land-use, cessation of traffic congestion, low user costs, fewer time delays and environmental burdens, mobility solutions to elderly and disabled people in the form of efficient and safe transport. The integration of shared mobility solutions with automated gateways and autonomous PT systems has also been investigated in the literature to certain degrees. Traffic simulation, analytical reviews and stated-preference surveys and limited filed data have been used to perform scenario analysis of various AV-based PT and ITS strategies in the existing transport literature. However, the review also found that the majority of literature lacked in concise integration of stakeholder engagement, real-world traffic data, cost and emission models and detailed traffic simulation modelling for life-cycle implications of ITS and AV transport.  
Results also show that barriers regarding the technical, technological and policy-making exist for the practical, large-scale implementation of automated transit. Fragmentation of the government agencies involved, the distance between the research and stakeholder spectrums and divided public opinion further complicates the situation. The sustainability triple-bottom-line approach may be used for determining the long-term impacts of autonomous transit. As such, this study, which acts as a platform for describing the current state and need for a life-cycle analysis method for evaluating the application of autonomous rapid PT, identifies that there may be a potential for autonomous bus rapid transit (BRT) services to increase the productivity, energy and fuel savings capacity, as well as safety, of the urban transportation systems.  
Conceptualisation, methodology, formal analysis, and writing--original draft, U.H.; supervision, writing--review and editing, and validation, A.W.; review and editing, H.A.J. All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research project is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) scholarship.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.