Understanding the Highway Safety Benefits of Different Approaches of Connected Vehicles in Reduced Visibility Conditions

Abstract

This study evaluated the effectiveness of connected vehicle (CV) technologies in adverse visibility conditions using microscopic traffic simulation. Traffic flow characteristics deteriorate significantly in reduced visibility conditions resulting in high crash risks. This study applied CV technologies on a segment of Interstate I-4 in Florida to improve traffic safety under fog conditions. Two types of CV approaches (i.e., connected vehicles without platooning (CVWPL) and connected vehicles with platooning (CVPL) were applied to reduce the crash risk in terms of three surrogate measures of safety: the standard deviation of speed, the standard deviation of headway, and rear-end crash risk index (RCRI). This study implemented vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technologies of CVs to acquire real-time traffic data using the microsimulation software VISSIM. A car-following model for both CV approaches was used with an assumption that the CVs would follow this car-following behavior in fog conditions. The model performances were evaluated under different CV market penetration rates (MPRs). The results showed that both CV approaches improved safety significantly in fog conditions as MPRs increase. To be more specific, the minimum MPR should be 30% to provide significant safety benefits in terms of surrogate measures of safety for both CV approaches over the base scenario (non-CV scenario). In terms of surrogate safety measures, CVPL significantly outperformed CVWPL when MPRs were equal to or higher than 50%. The results also indicated a significant improvement in the traffic operation characteristics in terms of average speed.