Automated Vehicle Technology Has the Potential to Smooth Traffic Flow and Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Sulaiman Almatrudi, Kanaad Parvate, Daniel Rothchild, Upadhi Vijay, Kathy Jang and Alexandre Bayen

Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley

Abstract: In an ideal world, all cars along a congested roadway would travel at the same constant average speed; however, this is hardly the case. As soon as one driver brakes, trailing cars must also brake to compensate, leading to “stop and go” traffic waves. This unnecessary braking and accelerating increases fuel consumption (and greenhouse gas emissions) by as much as 67 percent.1 Fortunately, automated vehicles (AVs) — even Level 2 AVs2 which are commercially available today — have the potential to mitigate this problem. By accelerating less than a human would, an AV with flow smoothing technology is able to smooth out a traffic wave, eventually leading to free-flowing traffic (See Figure 1). To demonstrate the potential of flow smoothing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, researchers at UC Berkeley used a calibrated model of the I-210 freeway in Los Angeles to simulate and measure the effect of deploying different percentages (10%, 20%, 30%) of flow-smoothing AVs on the average miles per gallon (MPG) of non-AVs in the traffic system.

Keywords: Engineering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/3ss034fw.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:itsrrp:qt3ss034fw

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().