Abstract
Fleets of shared Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) could replace private cars by providing a taxi-like service but at a cost similar to driving a private car. On the one hand, large Autonomous Taxi (AT) fleets may result in increased road capacity and lower demand for parking spaces. On the other hand, an increase in vehicle trips is very likely, as travelling becomes more convenient and affordable, and additionally, ATs need to drive unoccupied between requests. This study evaluates the impact of a city-wide introduction of ATs on traffic congestion. The analysis is based on a multi-agent transport simulation (MATSim) of Berlin (Germany) and the neighbouring Brandenburg area. The central focus is on precise simulation of both real-time AT operation and mixed autonomous/conventional vehicle traffic flow. Different ratios of replacing private car trips with AT trips are used to estimate the possible effects at different stages of introducing such services. The obtained results suggest that large fleets operating in cities may have a positive effect on traffic if road capacity increases according to current predictions. ATs will practically eliminate traffic congestion, even in the city centre, despite the increase in traffic volume. However, given no flow capacity improvement, such services cannot be introduced on a large scale, since the induced additional traffic volume will intensify today’s congestion.
Highlights
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are often considered a solution to the current problems of providing convenient, safe, efficient and still affordable ways of travelling
multi-agent transport simulation (MATSim)’s traffic model is based on a queue model, which takes the flow capacity and the storage capacity of a link in the network into account and moves vehicles according to the First-In First-Out (FIFO) scheme along the link: a car entering a network link is added to the tail of the link’s waiting queue, where it remains until the time required to drive along the link under free flow conditions has passed
To assess the impact of the Autonomous Taxi (AT) service on traffic congestion, we calculated the average travel time for all intra-city trips excluding empty drives made by ATs beginning in a given time period
Summary
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are often considered a solution to the current problems of providing convenient, safe, efficient and still affordable ways of travelling. Because sharing private AVs on a small scale, within families or small circles of people, imposes the need of synchronisation among users, only large-scale Autonomous Taxi (AT) services can eliminate such constraints and allow taking full advantage of the AV technology. AT services are aimed at combining advantages of different modes of transport, such as private car, shared car and taxi. On the fleet level, such services can help us greatly reduce the number of vehicles and parking spaces; nowadays private cars stay idle for almost the whole day. It remains unclear what impact AT fleets will have on traffic. Besides induced travel demand caused by higher accessibility and affordability, which is not dealt with in this study, large AT fleets may result in:
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