TABLE OF CONTENTS Unfortunately, the smartest car on the planet is absolutely powerless to alter its fate in terms of travel time in a traffic jam. Only through the exchange of information between vehicles and/or the infrastructure can traffic flows be improved.
Traffic congestion has a pervasive effect on society. For example, with the public driving 1,900 million vehicle hours on a daily basis, losses to the German economy due to congestion have been estimated at 250 million euros. A total of 18% of this travel is spent within stop-and-go conditions. In 1998, 2% of the routes were permanently congested and 17% were marginal. Future extrapolations show increases by as much as 351% by 2015. Figures from the United States are equally compelling the annual financial cost of traffic congestion is $63 billion for the 85 largest cities, with annual delay per rush hour traveler at 46 hours. Each year, an estimated 5.6 billion gallons of fuel is wasted by engines idling in traffic jams [43].
Government programs that have heretofore focused on safety are now beginning to explore cooperative vehicle-highway approaches for traffic flow improvement. This is particularly true in the Dutch Advanced Vehicle Guidance program and the Traffic Performance Assistance component of the German INVENT program. In addition to participation in INVENT, DaimlerChrysler is performing further internal work in traffic modeling/forecasting, traffic-adaptive vehicle systems, and simulations to assess their effects. Another center of research is the PATH program at the University of California-Berkeley, whose work...
