Estimation of Connected Vehicle Penetration Rate on Indiana Roadways

Abstract

Over 400 billion passenger vehicle trajectory waypoints are collected each month in the United States. This data creates many new opportunities for agencies to assess operational characteristics of roadways for more agile management of resources. This study compared traffic counts obtained from 24 Indiana Department of Transportation traffic counts stations with counts derived by the vehicle trajectories during the same periods. These stations were geographically distributed throughout Indiana with 13 locations on interstates and 11 locations on state or US roads. A Wednesday and a Saturday in January, August, and September 2020 are analyzed. The results show that the analyzed interstates had an average penetration of 4.3% with a standard deviation of 1.0. The non-interstate roads had an average penetration of 5.0% with a standard deviation of 1.36. These penetration levels suggest that connected vehicle data can provide a valuable data source for developing scalable roadway performance measures. Since all agencies currently have a highway monitoring system using fixed infrastructure, this paper concludes by recommending agencies integrate a connected vehicle penetration monitoring program into their traditional highway count station program to monitor the growing penetration of connected cars and trucks.