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Reducing the Environmental Impact of Midblock Crossing

Abrar Alali, Stephan Olariu

TL;DR

This paper tackles the environmental burden of midblock pedestrian crossing by leveraging V2I/V2V alerts containing crossing location and duration to adjust approaching vehicles’ speed rather than forcing stops. It introduces two speed-management schemes—immediate and deferred deceleration—and formalizes them with a safe-speed update rule, evaluating environmental benefits using a physics-based fuel/CO2 model. Through SUMO-based simulations of a fixed-crossing street with two vehicle types, it demonstrates reductions in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions of up to $16.7\%$, without increasing total trip time. The work fills a gap in the literature by focusing on environmental impact mitigation for midblock crossings and offers actionable guidance for deployment of alert-based speed control.

Abstract

Accommodating pedestrians crossing midblock has been shown to have harmful environmental consequences because of increased fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Somewhat surprisingly, no studies were devoted to mitigating the environmental impact of midblock crossing. Our main contribution is to propose schemes that mitigate the increased fuel consumption and CO2 emissions due to pedestrian midblock crossing by leveraging information about the location and expected duration of the crossing. This information is shared in a timely manner with approaching cars. We evaluated the impact of car decisions on fuel consumption and emissions by exploring potential trajectories that cars may take as a result of messages received. Our extensive simulations showed that timely dissemination of pedestrian crossing information to approaching vehicles can reduce fuel consumption and emissions by up to 16.7%.

Reducing the Environmental Impact of Midblock Crossing

TL;DR

This paper tackles the environmental burden of midblock pedestrian crossing by leveraging V2I/V2V alerts containing crossing location and duration to adjust approaching vehicles’ speed rather than forcing stops. It introduces two speed-management schemes—immediate and deferred deceleration—and formalizes them with a safe-speed update rule, evaluating environmental benefits using a physics-based fuel/CO2 model. Through SUMO-based simulations of a fixed-crossing street with two vehicle types, it demonstrates reductions in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions of up to , without increasing total trip time. The work fills a gap in the literature by focusing on environmental impact mitigation for midblock crossings and offers actionable guidance for deployment of alert-based speed control.

Abstract

Accommodating pedestrians crossing midblock has been shown to have harmful environmental consequences because of increased fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Somewhat surprisingly, no studies were devoted to mitigating the environmental impact of midblock crossing. Our main contribution is to propose schemes that mitigate the increased fuel consumption and CO2 emissions due to pedestrian midblock crossing by leveraging information about the location and expected duration of the crossing. This information is shared in a timely manner with approaching cars. We evaluated the impact of car decisions on fuel consumption and emissions by exploring potential trajectories that cars may take as a result of messages received. Our extensive simulations showed that timely dissemination of pedestrian crossing information to approaching vehicles can reduce fuel consumption and emissions by up to 16.7%.
Paper Structure (10 sections, 4 equations, 5 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 10 sections, 4 equations, 5 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Our contributions
  3. Literature review
  4. Fuel consumption and emission estimation model
  5. The alert system model
  6. Speed reduction schemes
  7. Simulation and results
  8. Simulation model
  9. Simulation results
  10. Concluding remarks

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: A generic alert system model.
  • Figure 2: Evaluated scenarios of vehicle trajectory when receiving three alert messages
  • Figure 3: Trajectory of a car receiving alert message about midblock crossing
  • Figure 4: The increase of (a )fuel consumed and (b) emitted CO2 for all the trajectories compared to no pedestrian trajectory in all scenarios
  • Figure 5: The reduction of (a) fuel consumed and (b) emitted CO2 for all the trajectories compared to sudden stop trajectory in all scenarios