Quantifying and mitigating the impact of vehicular routing on the urban environment

Urbanization pressures cities to efficiently accommodate the increasing demand for mobility, making traffic optimization challenging due to the complex interplay be- tween road networks and traffic dynamics, as drivers’ routing choices significantly in- fluence one another. City-related services, such as navigation services (e.g., TomTom) and mobility policies (e.g., road closures), impact traffic patterns and emissions. Nav- igation services can unintentionally increase emissions when many vehicles converge on the same routes, while mobility policies may have counterintuitive effects on traffic. We propose a simulation framework to assess the impact of road closure policies and navigation services on the urban environment. We use this framework and find that targeted road closures in Milan can reduce emissions by up to 10%, while others can increase emissions by nearly 50%. Then, we examine navigation services’ impact on vehicular traffic and CO2 emissions, finding that they reduce emissions at low traffic loads. However, at high traffic loads and penetration rates, they cause conformist behavior, leading to inefficiencies and potentially higher emissions. To mitigate the conformist behavior induced by navigation services and reduce CO2 emissions, we propose three solutions: (i) an individualistic approach using existing Alternative Routing (AR) algorithms, (ii) Metis, a coordinated solution that coordinates drivers and dynamically estimates traffic to diversify routes, and (iii) Polaris, an individual AR algorithm which considers road popularity to optimize traffic distribution. Moti- vated by the varying effectiveness of AR solutions across cities, we study cities’ route diversification, defining shortest path instability and introducing diverCity, a metric to assess a city’s propensity towards route diversity. Analysis shows that diverCity benefits from extensive road networks, leading to less congestion. We also address the impact of mobility attractors on diverCity and propose mitigation strategies. This thesis comprehensively studies vehicular traffic dynamics, offering a simulation framework to evaluate the environmental impact of mobility policies and navigation services. In addition, it presents solutions to mitigate negative impacts and proposes metrics to quantify a city’s potential to offer route diversity.

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