A Study on the Effects of Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communications on Traffic Congestion and Safety

Traffic congestion and safety are the two main issues of our roads around the globe. The population in the world is growing day by day. People buy cars every day to provide an easier lifestyle for themselves and their families. However, this causes problems such as crowded and less safe roads. As a result, there is a reduction in quality of life. Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) with various viable applications offers some useful features which have promised to solve or reduce the number of these issues. This research focuses on the Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication system (V2V), an application of ITS. The overall purpose of this study is to determine the impact of V2V communications on traffic congestion and safety. Specifically, this study aims to evaluate the effects of V2V communications on saturation flow rates under various scenarios, analyze the effects of V2V communications on vehicle delays under various saturation conditions, and analyze the impact of V2V on traffic safety at signalized intersections. The methodology involves scenario analysis and conditional probability estimation. Throughout this research seven scenarios were used to analyze saturation flow rate, traffic delay, and safety. The first scenario is the baseline scenario that has all typical vehicles and no V2V vehicles. The second to the seventh scenarios have V2V communications. The results of the analysis show that there is an increase in the saturation flow rate, a decrease in headway, and a reduction in traffic delay as the number of V2V in the traffic mix increases. The presence of at least 10% V2V in the traffic mix has the potential of improving the saturation flow rate by almost 8% for V2V headway of 0.5 second and almost 8% for V2V headway of 1.0 second. As the number of V2V increases, the increase in the saturation flow rate becomes more significant. The analysis also shows that the presence of V2V vehicles reduces traffic delay more significantly at the over-capacity condition. The result of safety analysis shows that the impact of V2V will be most significant in reducing crashes involving pedestrians, rear-end accidents, and angle accidents. This research benefits the road users, engineering designing the roads, transportation practitioners, and others who are involved in traffic engineering