Estimation of Passenger Car Equivalents for New Forms of Mobility - Investigating the effect of automated vehicles on the saturation flow of urban intersections

Abstract

Automated vehicles promise to change traffic patterns by improving traffic flow and increasing traffic safety. More and more road authorities are interested to know the effects of such new technologies in order to account for them when planning for the future transportation systems. In guidelines for the design and dimensioning of road infrastructure, transformation factors are used to account for vehicles with differing dimensions and dynamic behaviors. These differences are expressed by the so-called Passenger Car Equivalents. The paper investigates which properties of automated vehicles lead to changes in traffic performance. Based on that, we propose a factor model to be incorporated into the guidelines to account for future changes in vehicle technology and compute adapted values for the mixed traffic between conventional and automated vehicles in traffic.