Transitioning to a driverless city: Evaluating a hybrid system for autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles

Autonomous vehicles will transform urban mobility. However, before being fully implemented, autonomous vehicles will navigate cities in mixed-traffic roads, negotiating traffic with human-driven vehicles. In this work, we simulate a system of autonomous vehicles co-existing with human-driven vehicles, analyzing the consequences of system design choices. The system consists of a network of arterial roads with exclusive lanes for autonomous vehicles where they can travel in platoons. This paper presents the evaluation of this system in realistic scenarios evaluating the impacts of the system on travel time using mesoscopic traffic simulation. We used real data from the metropolis of São Paulo to create the simulation scenarios. The results show that the proposed system would bring reductions to the average travel time of the city commuters and other benefits such as the reduction of the space required to handle all the traffic.