Google Research has published a study in Nature Cities on using navigation platforms to improve traffic flow across a city. The paper, “Urban congestion relief experiments through routing-app interventions”, says that coordinating even a small fraction of trips to disperse traffic can measurably improve driving speeds and reduce emissions for the entire city.
The study says vehicle transportation remains central to modern life, but also carries major costs. It cites drivers spending an average of 2.6 years of their life on the road, and private cars and vans accounting for around 10% of global CO2 emissions.
Google Research says that while individual vehicle routing is standard in navigation products, system-wide routing has not yet been widely used. The research points to opportunities from navigation services, connected vehicles, smart cities, and autonomous vehicles to improve measurement and optimisation of transport networks.
The paper also notes that Google Research has already shown infrastructure-level intervention through Project Green Light, which uses AI to optimise city traffic lights. The new study says it provides a framework for moving from individual trip optimisation toward a cooperative routing approach aimed at improving total network efficiency.
According to the paper, large-scale empirical validation of network optimisation has been limited, and the experiments in this study are presented as a first large-scale, real-world test of navigation platforms for traffic improvement.
Source: research.google.
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