Estimation of Connected Vehicle Penetration on US Roads in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania

Margaret Hunter,Darcy M Bullock,Howell Li,Jijo K Mathew

doi:10.4236/jtts.2021.114037

Abstract

Connected vehicle data is an important assessment tool for agencies to evaluate the performance of freeways and arterials, provided there is sufficient penetration to provide statistically robust performance measures. A common concern by agencies interested in using crowd sourced probe data is the penetration rate across different types of roads, different hours of the day, and different regions. This paper describes and demonstrates a methodology that uses data from state highway performance monitoring systems in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The study analyzes 54 locations over the 3 states for select Wednesdays and Saturdays in 2020 and 2021. Overall, across all locations and dates, the median penetration was approximately 4.5%. The median penetration for August 2020 for Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania was 4.6%, 4.3%, and 4.0%, respectively. The median penetration for those same states in August 2020 on interstates and non-interstates was 3.9% and 4.6%, respectively. Additionally, the study conducted a longitudinal evaluation of Indiana penetration for selected months between January 2020 and June 2021. Indiana penetration increased modestly between December 2020 and June 2021, perhaps due to the post-COVID rebound of passenger vehicle traffic. This paper concludes by recommending that the techniques described in this paper be scaled to other states so that traffic engineers can make informed decisions on the use and limitations of connected vehicle data for various use cases.

Highlights

Connected vehicle data is opening new frontiers for agencies to evaluate the performance of their road networks
This paper builds upon an earlier paper that focused on 24 sites in Indiana over three months [5] and characterizes the connected vehicle penetration levels over during 7 months at 54 sites in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (Figure 1)
Percent penetration in Indiana had the largest range of penetrations between 2.5% and 9.8%, while the percent penetrations were between 2.4% and 8.3% for Ohio and between 2.3% and 5.9% for Pennsylvania

Summary

Introduction

Connected vehicle data is opening new frontiers for agencies to evaluate the performance of their road networks. The resulting data sets can provide agencies with a plethora of historically difficult to collect data, such as traffic signal performance measures, hard-braking events, interstate congestion, and common detours around road closures [1] [2] [3] [4]. As this paper is one of the first papers on connected vehicle penetration, it presents a preliminary methodology for calculating percent penetration that compares two data sets: Department of Transportation (DOT) collected traffic count data and connected vehicle trajectory data. The main objective of this paper is to report the percent penetration of connected vehicle data observed in the states of Indiana (IN), Ohio (OH), and Pennsylvania (PA)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion