  Modern cities are composed of complex socio-technical systems that exist to
provide services effectively to their residents and visitors. In this context,
smart mobility systems aim to support the efficient exploitation of the city
transport facilities as well as sustainable mobility within the urban
environment. People need to travel quickly and conveniently between locations
at different scales, ranging from a trip of a few blocks within a city to a
journey across cities or further. At the same time, goods need to be timely
delivered considering the needs of both the users and the businesses. While
most of the mobility and delivery solutions can cover significant distances and
multiple requests, they suffer when the requests come from the growing
neighborhoods and hard-to-reach areas such as city centers, corporate
headquarters, and hospitals. In the last few years, several cities indicated
interest in using Autonomous Vehicles (AV) for the "last-mile" mobility
services. With them, it seems to be easier to get people and goods around using
fewer vehicles. In this context, Autonomous Shuttles (AS) are beginning to be
thought of as a new mobility/delivery service into the city center where narrow
streets are not easily served by traditional buses. They allow them to serve
critical areas with minimal new infrastructure and reducing noise and
pollution. The goal of this article is to present an innovative vision on the
introduction of the Autonomous Shuttles-as-a service (ASaaS) concept as the key
pillar for the realization of innovative and sustainable proximity mobility.
Through a set of real application scenarios, we present our view, and we
discuss a set of challenges, opportunities, and social implications that this
way to reimage the mobility of the future introduces.
