How Much Route Guidance is Enough?

Abstract

Four archetypal street patterns were modelled using traffic microsimulation, populated with vehicles possessing various levels of route guidance, and run multiple times to reveal outcomes in terms of journey length, duration, cost and carbon emissions. The findings show that the topology of urban street patterns interacts strongly with the amount of route guidance provided. In some network types the amount of route guidance provided led to consistent improvements in network and vehicle performance, whilst in other networks the same performance could be achieved with 100% route guidance as it could with 0%. A fundamental relationship is revealed between the universal network coefficient Beta (β) and the overall level of route guidance required to optimise performance across all variables. The implications for telematics strategies are profound: it seems every driver does not need to know everything in order to bring about optimal network performance. Indeed, there may be more self-optimization than we think.