Environmental and Mobility Impacts of Large-Scale Adoption of Eco-Driving: An Urban Arterial Case

It is widely accepted that eco-driving saves energy for individual vehicles. However, it is inconclusive whether these energy savings hold up for the overall traffic stream, and over how one should eco-drive (e.g., long, slow acceleration or rapid acceleration). This paper seeks to shed light on these issues by: 1) simulating the impact of eco-driving using the real-world effects of an eco-driving technology, on a network that has been calibrated specifically for energy/emissions estimation; and 2) conducting a comprehensive search for the acceleration and deceleration behaviors that maximize energy savings. For (2), the maximum acceleration rate and deceleration rate were each limited by 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50%. By testing all of the resulting combinations of acceleration/deceleration rates, the greatest energy savings (about 4%) were found at a 10% reduction in acceleration rate and 50% reduction in deceleration rate. These results suggest that deceleration, more than acceleration, should be limited in order to maximize energy savings for the overall traffic stream under the conditions examined in this paper.