Towards the sustainability of road transport through the introduction of AV technology

Abstract

The paper investigates the potential for level 2 autonomous vehicle technology to improve four prevailing sustainability issues specifically on highways: high congestion levels, increasing accident rates, high carbon dioxide emissions and poor journey time reliability. Cooperative adaptive cruise control shows potential to achieve high-volume cooperative driving on highways by controlling these parameters and forming vehicle platoons. Accident rates, carbon dioxide emissions and journey times can be reduced as a result. The risks of platooning are discussed and a minimum safe platoon headway is established to mitigate the risk of vehicle platoon collisions. This headway is applied to a real highway case study, demonstrating the potential to increase notional highway design capacity from 3600 vehicles per hour (vph) to 9213 vph, with significant sustainability improvements possible. Recommendations are made to complete a number of policy implementation and technology development tasks aimed to create the best chance of achieving the identified sustainability benefits within a 20-year timeframe.