Mobility Impacts of Autonomous Vehicle Systems

Automated vehicle (AV) technologies are rapidly maturing, and time line for their wider deployment is currently uncertain. Despite uncertainty these technologies are expected to bring about numerous societal benefits, such as enhanced traffic safety, improved mobility and reduced fuel emissions. In this paper, we propose a novel bottom-up approach to model various SAE levels on VISSIM in a two lane highway environment featuring an on-ramp. Our results indicate that mobility in SAE level 1 always exceeds that of SAE level 0, because the former has a consistently higher acceleration for given conditions. SAE level 2 provides more lateral stability and therefore less implied accidents than level 1 or 0 due to lower lateral deviations. For level 3, key consideration is to model the transition between human and system control. In SAE level 4 we model the operation of autonomous vehicles in Operational Design Domain (ODD) and transition to minimal risk conditions outside ODD. SAE level 5 overcomes impact of these transitions and hence has a better mobility than lower SAE levels. The models can help policymakers to understand the impact of autonomous vehicles on mobility and guide them in making critical policy decisions.