Fuel saving and other benefits of dynamic advisory speeds on a multilane arterial road

Current traffic control systems which customarily give no direct information to the driver could benefit by the addition of dynamic advisory speed signs. Such signs, first introduced in the 1950s, can enable drivers to pass through successive green signals and give reduced fuel consumption, stops, travel time, emissions, noise and accidents. To attempt to quantify these reductions, a discrete vehicle simulation using program multsim has been run on a 6 km idealized road and also on 2.3 Km of the multilane arterial, military road, Sydney. Typically, with all drivers complying, fuel savings of the order of 10 per cent and a halving of stops have been predicted. Travel time reductions and fuel savings depend on the coordination speed. Higher coordination speeds favour travel time savings over fuel consumption reductions, whilst lower coordination speeds favour fuel savings. Operation near the minimum fuel consumption speed is desirable. Traffic management could benefit from the change in shape of platoons. This should allow more stringent signal timing in adaptively controlled networks, giving greater flexibility for operational designs (a).