Assessing the Potential Impacts of Connected Vehicles: Mobility,Environmental, and Safety Perspectives

The connected vehicle is a rapidly emerging paradigm aimed at deploying and developing a fully connected transportation system that enables data exchange among vehicles, infrastructure, and mobile devices to improve mobility, enhance safety, and reduce the adverse environmental impacts of the transportation systems. This study focuses on micromodeling and quantitatively assessing the potential impacts of the connected vehicle (CV) on mobility, safety, and the environment. To assess the benefits of CVs, a modeling framework is developed based on traffic microsimulation for a real network located in the city of Toronto, Canada, to mimic communication between enabled vehicles. In this study, we examine the effects of providing real-time routing guidance and advisory warning messages to CVs. In addition, to take into account the rerouting in nonconnected vehicles (non-CVs) in response to varying sources of information such as apps, global positioning systems (GPS), variable message signs (VMS), or simply seeing the traffic back up, the impact of fraction of non-CV vehicles was also considered and evaluated. Therefore, vehicles in this model are divided into; uninformed/unfamiliar not connected (non-CV), informed/familiar but not connected (non-CV) that get updates infrequently every 5 minutes or so (non-CV), and connected vehicles that receive information more frequently (CV). The results demonstrate the potential of connected vehicles to improve mobility, enhance safety, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) at the network-wide level. The results also show quantitatively how the market penetration of connected vehicles proportionally affects the performance of the traffic network. While the presented results are pertinent to the specifics of the road network modeled and cannot be generalized, the quantitative figures provide researchers and practitioners with ideas of what to expect from vehicle connectivity concerning mobility, safety, and environmental improvements.     

“Not just a taxi”? For-profit ridesharing,driver strategies,and VMT

The spread of GPS-based location services using smartphone applications has led to the rapid growth of new startups offering smartphone-enabled dispatch service for taxicabs, limousines, and ridesharing vehicles. This change in communicative technology has been accompanied by the creation of new categories of car service, particularly as drivers of limousines and private vehicles use the apps to provide on-demand service of a kind previously reserved for taxicabs. One of the most controversial new models of car service is for-profit ridesharing, which combines the for-profit model of taxi service with the overall traffic reduction goals of ridesharing. A preliminary attempt is here made at understanding how for-profit ridesharing compares to traditional taxicab and ridesharing models. Ethnographic interviews are drawn on to illustrate the range of motivations and strategies used by for-profit ridesharing drivers in San Francisco, California as they make use of the service. A range of driver strategies is identified, ranging from incidental, to part-time, to full-time driving. This makes possible a provisional account of the potential ecological impacts of the spread of this model of car service, based on the concept of taxicab efficiency, conceived as the ratio of shared versus unshared miles driven.