The relationship between real-world traffic and pavement raveling is unclear and subject to ongoing debates. This research proposes a novel approach that extends beyond traditional correlation analyses to explore causal mechanisms between mixed traffic and raveling. This approach incorporates the causal discovery method, and is applied to five Dutch porous asphalt (PA) highway sites that have substantial data sets. Findings indicate a nonlinear relationship between traffic volume and raveling, with road age emerging as a shared contributor. The results also suggest that the degree to which different vehicle types contribute as a causal factor for raveling varies with carriageway configurations and lane characteristics. This underlines the need for targeted maintenance strategies. Challenges remain due to confounding correlations among traffic variables, necessitating further development of causal discovery models. This study may not conclusively resolve the debate on to what extent traffic contributes to raveling, but we argue we provide sufficient evidence against rejecting this hypothesis.

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With the increased deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in mixed traffic flow, ensuring safe and efficient interactions between AVs and human road users is important. In urban environments, intersections have various conflicts that can greatly affect driving safety and traffic efficiency. This study uses road test data to examine the possible safety and efficiency impacts of intersection conflict resolution involving AVs. The contribution comprises two main aspects. Firstly. we prepare and open a high-quality lateral conflict resolution dataset derived from the Argoverse-2 data, specifically targeting urban intersections. A rigorous data processing pipeline is applied to extract pertinent scenarios, rectify anomalies, enhance data quality, and annotate conflict regimes. This effort yields 5000+ AV-involved and 16000 AV-free cases, covering rich conflict regimes and balanced traffic states. Secondly, we employ surrogate safety measures to assess the safety impact of AVs on human-driven vehicles (HVs) and pedestrians. In addition, a novel concept of Minimum Recurrent Clearance Time (MRCT) is proposed to quantify the traffic efficiency impacts of AVs during conflict resolution. The results show that, for AV–HV and HV–HV conflict resolution processes, the differences in selected safety and efficiency measures for human drivers are statistically insignificant. In contrast, pedestrians demonstrate diverse behaviour adjustments. Some pedestrians behave more conservatively when interacting with AVs than with HVs. Notably, the efficiency of AV-involved conflict resolution is significantly lower than in AV-free instances due to the conservative driving style of AVs. This efficiency gap is particularly large when AVs pass through the conflict point after human drivers in unprotected left turns. These observations offer a perspective on how AVs potentially affect the safety and efficiency of mixed traffic. The processed dataset is openly available via https://github.com/RomainLITUD/conflict_resolution_dataset.

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The in-vehicle communication provides promising opportunities to improve the road safety and traffic efficiency. Previous studies demonstrated that the professional drivers have better driving skills than the non-professional drivers who allocate more attention to secondary tasks. However, they may not be sensitive to the new in-vehicle technology. In addition, these qualitative studies failed to elaborate on the visual and response behavior differences among different driver groups (professional drivers such as taxi, bus, motorcoach, and non-professional drivers), and lacked the quantitative analysis of driving patterns in a new environment. This paper explores the differences in visual interaction, response characteristics, driving performance, and behavior patterns between the professional and non-professional drivers in the connected environment through a case study of intersection-approaching behavior using a driving simulator. More precisely, two driving scenarios (baseline and human–machine interface (HMI)) were designed in the driving simulator, and 65 participants, including 34 professional drivers and 31 non-professional drivers, completed the experiment. In the HMI scenario, the driver was provided with the signal light phase and phase transition remaining time of the current intersection. This paper also proposes a driving pattern extraction model based on the Bayesian non-parametric method combined with a text clustering algorithm to perform a quantitative description of the driving patterns. The results show that the professional drivers tend to interact less with the HMI compared with the non-professional drivers. Moreover, the professional drivers’ first gaze at the HMI occurs and responds earlier. The proposed driving model can effectively describe 7 patterns of intersection-approaching behavior. The connected information can significantly improve the efficiency of the intersection traffic and the driving behavior. However, the professional drivers are more responsive and behave more consistently. This study can provide insights into the development of personalized assisted driving systems, as the two driving populations differ in their interactions, responses, and behavioral patterns.

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This paper presents a novel approach to data-driven time-dependent origin–destination (OD) estimation using a joint origin–destination-path choice formulation, inspired by the well-known equivalence of doubly constraint gravity models and multinomial logit models for joint O–D choice. This new formulation provides a theoretical basis and generalizes an earlier contribution. Although including path choice increases the dimensionality of the problem, it also dramatically improves the quality of the data one can directly use to solve it (e.g. measured path travel times versus coarse centroid-to-centroid travel times); and opens up possibilities to combine different assimilation techniques in a single framework: (1) fast shortest path set computation using static (e.g. road type) and dynamic (speed, travel time) link properties; (2) predicting a “prior OD matrix” using the resulting path-shares and (estimated or measured) production and attraction totals; and (3) scaling/constraining this prior using link flows (informative of demand). If the resulting system of equations has insufficient rank, we use principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality, solve this reduced problem, and transform that solution back to a full OD matrix. Comprehensive tests and sensitivity analysis on 7 networks with different sizes and characteristics give an empirical underpinning of the extended equivalence principle; demonstrate good accuracy and reliability of the OD estimation method overall; and suggest that the method is robust with respect to major assumptions and contributing factors.@en

Traffic condition forecasting is fundamental for Intelligent Transportation Systems. Besides accuracy, many services require an estimate of uncertainty for each prediction. Uncertainty quantification must consider the inherent randomness in traffic dynamics, the so-called aleatoric uncertainty, and the additional distrust caused by data shortage, the so-called epistemic uncertainty. They together depict how predictable macroscopic traffic is. This study uses deep ensembles of graph neural networks to estimate both types of uncertainty in network-level speed forecasting. Experimental results given by the used model reveal that, although rare congestion patterns arise randomly, the short-term predictability of traffic states is mainly restricted by the irreducible stochasticity in traffic dynamics. The predicted future state bifurcates into congested or free-flowing cases. This study suggests that the potential for improving prediction models through expanding speed and flow data is limited while diversifying data types is crucial.@en

Safety is the cornerstone of L2+ autonomous driving and one of the fundamental tasks is forward collision warning that detects potential rear-end collisions. Potential collisions are also known as conflicts, which have long been indicated using Time-to-Collision with a critical threshold to distinguish safe and unsafe situations. Such indication, however, focuses on a single scenario and cannot cope with dynamic traffic environments. For example, TTC-based crash warning frequently misses potential collisions in congested traffic, and issues false alarms during lane-changing or parking. Aiming to minimise missed and false alarms in conflict detection, this study proposes a more reliable approach based on vehicle spacing patterns. To test this approach, we use both synthetic and real-world conflict data. Our experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms single-threshold TTC unless conflicts happened in the exact way that TTC is defined, which is rarely true. When conflicts are heterogeneous and when the information of conflict situation is incompletely known, as is the case with real-world conflicts, our approach can achieve less missed and false detection. This study offers a new perspective for conflict detection, and also a general framework allowing for further elaboration to minimise missed and false alarms. Less missed alarms will contribute to fewer accidents, meanwhile, fewer false alarms will promote people's trust in collision avoidance systems. We thus expect this study to contribute to safer and more trustworthy autonomous driving.

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Conditionally automated driving enables drivers to engage in non-driving-related activities, with the responsibility to take over vehicle control upon request. This takeover process increases the risk of collisions, especially when drivers fail to safely complete takeovers within limited time budgets (i.e., the time offered by automation for takeovers). This phenomenon underlines the significance of providing time budgets that sufficiently accommodate drivers' takeover time (i.e., the time required by drivers to resume conscious control of vehicles). Considering that drivers' takeover time varies significantly across scenarios, this study centres on understanding the role of driver perception in takeover time using the Task-Capability Interface (TCI) theory. The TCI theory suggests that drivers adjust their behaviours based on their perceived task demands and driver capabilities. Accordingly, in a driving simulator experiment featuring diverse traffic densities and distractions, we investigated drivers' takeover time while capturing their perceived task demands and capabilities through a takeover-oriented questionnaire based on established instruments. The results show that drivers generally have longer takeover time as their perceived task demand rises, perceived driver capability diminishes, and perceived spare capacity (perceived driver capability minus perceived task demand) decreases. These patterns fluctuate under conditions of low perceived task demand or high perceived driver capability. When both conditions coincide, drivers necessitate a considerably longer time to regain vehicle control. Our findings on takeover time contribute to the development of strategies aimed at predicting drivers' takeover time, optimizing time budgets, fostering human-centred vehicle design, and enhancing the safety of conditionally automated driving.

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Enabling cycling at the home side or at the activity side of transit trips has been recognized as a promising solution to address transit network discrepancies and enhance connectivity between residents and employment opportunities. However, this multimodal solution is conditional to bicycle parking and cycle lanes, and urban planners need tools to identify relevant locations for these infrastructures. This research presents a novel method to quantify the impact of potential cycling infrastructures on job accessibility. Using a logsum-based indicator, we assess the spatial distribution of accessibility improvements across neighborhoods when residents have the option to cycle from and to transit stops. Then, we quantify the individual contribution of every potential bicycle parking location and cycle lane to the overall accessibility improvements. The proposed approach offers valuable support to urban planners in identifying the best locations for (1) multimodal bicycle parking and (2) cycle lanes to foster synergies between cycling and transit. To demonstrate the efficacy of our method, we apply it to the case study of Amsterdam. The findings reveal that bicycle parking at metro stops and cycle lanes connecting these stops to dense and remote locations contribute the most to accessibility improvements, as they effectively connect these areas to high-frequency and high-speed transit lines. Additionally, we observe that few strategic infrastructures account for most of the accessibility improvements in Amsterdam.

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Resolving predicted conflicts is vital for safe and efficient autonomous vehicles (AV). In practice, vehicular motion prediction faces inherent uncertainty due to heterogeneous driving behaviours and environments. This spatial uncertainty increases non-linearly with prediction time horizons, leading AVs to perceive more road space occupied by conflicting vehicles. Reacting early to resolve predicted conflicts can ensure safety but may adversely affect traffic efficiency. Therefore, determining how far ahead AVs should start resolving predicted conflicts based on safety and traffic efficiency constraints is crucial. To answer this question, this study proposes a novel approach to explore the trade-off between safety and traffic efficiency considering prediction uncertainty. Firstly, a continuous-time motion prediction framework is proposed for estimating the spatial probability distribution of a vehicle's future position at any moment within the maximum time horizon. Subsequently, average driver space and the corresponding traffic flow are derived from the safety settings of AV and prediction uncertainty. As such, the safety-efficiency trade-off can be quantified. Experiments show that mandatory decision points, high speeds, and traffic state transitions usually cause fast-increasing prediction uncertainty. A case study of Intelligent Driver Models (IDM) shows that traffic efficiency drops rapidly when AVs resolve predicted conflicts longer than 1.5 seconds ahead. AVs can act earlier on motorways for efficiency concerns but must be myopic at urban intersections. Prediction uncertainty fundamentally constrains the safety-efficiency performance of AVs. These findings are instructive for designing traffic-compatible AVs.

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Traffic conflict detection is essential for proactive road safety by identifying potential collisions before they occur. Existing methods rely on surrogate safety measures tailored to specific interactions (e.g., car-following, side-swiping, or path-crossing) and require varying thresholds in different traffic conditions. This variation leads to inconsistencies and limited adaptability of conflict detection in evolving traffic environments, particularly as the integration of autonomous driving systems adds complexity. Consequently, there is an increasing need for consistent detection of traffic conflicts across interaction contexts. To address this need, we propose a unified probabilistic approach in this study. The proposed approach establishes a unified framework of traffic conflict detection, where traffic conflicts are formulated as context-dependent extreme events of road user interactions. The detection of conflicts is then decomposed into a series of statistical learning tasks: representing interaction contexts, inferring proximity distributions, and assessing extreme collision risk. The unified formulation accommodates diverse hypotheses of traffic conflicts and the learning tasks enable data-driven analysis of factors such as motion states of road users, environment conditions, and participant characteristics. Jointly, this approach supports consistent and comprehensive evaluation of the collision risk emerging in road user interactions. We demonstrate the proposed approach by experiments using real-world trajectory data. A unified metric for indicating conflicts is first trained with lane-change interactions on German highways, and then compared with existing metrics using near-crash events from the U.S. 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study. Our results show that the unified metric provides effective collision warnings, generalises across distinct datasets and traffic environments, covers a broad range of conflict types, and captures a long-tailed distribution of conflict intensity. In summary, this study provides an explainable and generalisable approach that enables traffic conflict detection across varying interaction contexts. The findings highlight its potential to enhance the safety assessment of traffic infrastructures and policies, improve collision warning systems for autonomous driving, and deepen the understanding of road user behaviour in safety–critical interactions.

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Integrating Automated Vehicles (AVs) into existing traffic systems holds the promise of enhanced road safety, reduced congestion, and more sustainable travel. Effective integration of AVs requires understanding the interactions between AVs and Human-driving Vehicles (HVs), especially during the transition period in which AVs and HVs coexist in a mixed traffic environment. Numerous recent empirical studies find reduced headways of human drivers following an AV compared to following an HV, and attribute this reduction to behavioural changes of drivers when they follow AVs. However, more factors may be at play due to the inherent inconsistencies between the comparison conditions of HV-following-AV and HV-following-HV. This study scrutinises three alternative explanations for the observed reduction in headways: (1) systematic differences in car-following states during data collection, (2) systematic differences in driving variability between leading AVs and HVs, and (3) systematic differences in driving characteristics of leading AVs versus HVs. We use a large-scale dataset extracted from Lyft AV motion data and examine each of these explanations through data stratification and simulation. Our results show that all three mechanisms contribute to the observed reduction in headways of human drivers following AVs. In addition, our findings highlight the importance of driving homogeneity and stability in achieving reliably shorter headways. Thereby, this study offers a more comprehensive understanding on the difference between HV–AV and HV–HV interactions in mixed traffic, and is expected to promote more effective integration of AVs into human traffic.

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Limited available market share data seems to suggest that ridesourcing platforms benefit from, even thrive on, socio-economic inequality. We suspect that this is associated with high levels of socio-economic inequality allowing for cheap labour as well as increasing the share of travellers with a considerably above-average willingness to pay for travel time savings and comfort. We test the relation between inequality and system performance by means of an agent-based simulation model representing within-day and day-to-day supply-demand interaction in the ridesourcing market. The model captures travellers’ mode choice with a heterogeneous perception of relevant time components, as well as job seekers’ participation choice with heterogeneous reservation wage. Our experiments cover scenarios for the entire spectrum ranging from perfect equality to extreme inequality. For several of such scenarios, we explore alternative platform pricing strategies. Our analysis shows a strong, positive relationship between socio-economic inequality and ridesourcing market share. This is the outcome of the combination of cheap labour and time-sensitive ridesourcing users, reinforced by network effects inherent to ridesourcing markets. We find that driver earnings are minimal in urban areas with large socio-economic inequality. In such contexts, drivers are likely to face a high platform commission, and yet, fierce competition for passengers.

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Predicting the trajectories of road agents is fundamental for self-driving cars. Trajectory prediction contains many sources of uncertainty in data and modelling. A thorough understanding of this uncertainty is crucial in a safety-critical task like auto-piloting a vehicle. In practice, it is necessary to distinguish between the uncertainty caused by partial observability of all factors that may affect a driver's near-future decisions, the so-called aleatoric uncertainty, and the uncertainty of deploying a model in new scenarios that are possibly not present in the training set, the so-called epistemic uncertainty. They reflect the trade-off between data collection and model improvement In this paper, we propose a new framework to systematically quantify both sources of uncertainty. Specifically, to approximate the spatial distribution of an agent's future position, we propose a 2D histogram-based deep learning model combined with deep ensemble techniques for measuring aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty by entropy-based quantities. The proposed Uncertainty Quantification Network (UQnet) employs a causal part to enhance its generalizability so rare driving behaviours can be effectively identified. Experiments on the INTERACTION dataset show that UQnet is able to give more robust predictions in generalizability tests compared to the correlation-based models. Further analysis presents that high aleatoric uncertainty cases are mainly caused by heterogeneous driving behaviours and unknown intended directions. Based on this aleatoric uncertainty component, we estimate the lower bounds of mean-square-error and final-displacement-error as indicators for the predictability of trajectories. Furthermore, the analysis of epistemic uncertainty illustrates that domain knowledge of speed-dependent driving behaviour is essential for adapting a model from low-speed to high-speed situations. Our paper contributes to motion forecasting with a new framework, that recasts the problem of accuracy improvement in a way that focuses on differentiating between unpredictable components and rare cases for which more and different data should be collected.

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This paper explores temporal patterns in travel production using a full month of production data from traffic analysis zones (TAZ) in the (entire) Netherlands. The mentioned data is a processed aggregated derivative (due to pr ivacy concerns) from GSM traces of a Dutch telecommunication company. This research thus also sheds light on whether such a processed data source is representative of both regular and non-regular patterns in travel production and how such data can be used for planning purposes. To this end, we construct normalized matrix (heatmap) representations of weekly hour-by-hour travel production patterns of over 1200 TAZs, which we cluster using K-means combined with deep convolutional neural networks (inception V3) to extract relevant features. A silhouette score shows that three dominant clusters of temporal patterns can be discerned (K=3). These three clusters have distinctly different within-day and day-to-day production patterns in terms of peak period intensity over different days of the week. Subsequently, a spatial analysis of these clusters reveals that the differences can be related to (easily observable) land-use features such as urbanization levels (i.e., Urban, Rural, and mixed-level). To substantiate this hypothesis and the usefulness of this clustering result, we apply an OVR-SMOTE-XGBoost ensemble classification model on the land-use features of the TAZs (i.e., to identify their cluster). The results of our clustering analysis show that given the land-use features, the overall production patterns are identifiable. Further analysis of the mixed-level areas shows a more complex relationship between temporal heterogeneity and spatial characteristics. Population density seems to impose additional uncertainty on the temporal patterns. All in all, feature selection and spatial and temporal discretization play essential roles in identifying the dominant trip production patterns. These findings are directly useful for data-driven estimation and prediction of demand time series. Furthermore, this study provides further insights into people's mobility, relevant for transportation analysis and policies.

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Car-Following (CF), as a fundamental driving behaviour, has significant influences on the safety and efficiency of traffic flow. Investigating how human drivers react differently when following autonomous vs. human-driven vehicles (HV) is thus critical for mixed traffic flow. Research in this field can be expedited with trajectory datasets collected by Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). However, trajectories collected by AVs are noisy and not readily applicable for studying CF behaviour. This paper extracts and enhances two categories of CF data, HV-following-AV (H-A) and HV-following-HV (H-H), from the open Lyft level-5 dataset. First, CF pairs are selected based on specific rules. Next, the quality of raw data is assessed by anomaly analysis. Then, the raw CF data is corrected and enhanced via motion planning, Kalman filtering, and wavelet denoising. As a result, 29k+ H-A and 42k+ H-H car-following segments are obtained, with a total driving distance of 150k+ km. A diversity assessment shows that the processed data cover complete CF regimes for calibrating CF models. This open and ready-to-use dataset provides the opportunity to investigate the CF behaviours of following AVs vs. HVs from real-world data. It can further facilitate studies on exploring the impact of AVs on mixed urban traffic.@en

This study presents a new method to infer the average two-dimensional (2D) spacing between interacting vehicles in urban traffic from trajectory data. In this context, 2D spacing reflects the amount of road space consumed by pairs of interacting vehicles, and is related to 2D density at the macroscopic level. Due to complex interaction and conflicts in urban traffic, the inherent assumptions in traditional traffic flow models, such as unidirectional flow and homogeneity, are often violated. Such violation challenges direct measurement of urban vehicle spacing. The proposed method addresses this challenge by focusing on the relative movement between interacting vehicles and aggregating the accumulated presence of vehicles in similar scenarios. We apply the method to a large-scale urban trajectory dataset called pNEUMA, and validate the consistency of the method through bootstrapping. By applying the method we obtain a new empirical relation between the average 2D spacing and the relative speeds between interacting vehicles. There are similarities between this empirical relation with the classical Fundamental Diagram of traffic flow in terms of shape and interpretation, and so we term it the “interaction Fundamental Diagram” (iFD). However, there are also key differences. The iFD does not represent steady-state (homogeneous and stationary) longitudinal behaviour; it describes the average amount of road space needed for vehicle interactions at different relative speeds. We believe these iFD relations contribute to understanding vehicle interaction in urban traffic, and can offer new insights for designing safer and more efficient urban intersections.

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Understanding preferences and behaviours in road freight transport is valuable for planning and analysis. This paper proposes a data-driven vehicle routing and scheduling approach for use as a descriptive tool to study road freight transport activities. The model developed seeks to capture planners’ or drivers’ preferences in order to reproduce observed road freight activities. The model is based on a parametrized time-dependent vehicle routing problem whose parameters can be estimated from a set of observed planned tours. We propose a Bayesian optimization technique for parameter estimation of the model. Empirical results show that the model can fit real-world data accurately and synthesize tour flows close to reality.

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Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) data provides valuable insights into travel demand patterns by capturing people's consecutive locations. A major challenge, however, is how the polling interval (PI; the time between consecutive location updates) affects the accuracy in reconstructing the spatio-temporal travel patterns. Longer PIs will lead to lower accuracy and may even miss shorter activities or trips when not properly accounted for. In this paper, we analyze the effects of the PI on the ability to reconstruct an origin–destination (OD) matrix. We also propose and validate a new data-driven method that improves accuracy in case of longer PIs. The new method first learns temporal patterns in activities and trips, based on travel diaries, that are then used to infer activity-travel patterns from the (sparse) GSM traces. Both steps are data-driven thus avoiding any a priori (behavioral, temporal) assumptions. To validate the method we use synthetic data generated from a calibrated agent-based transport model. This gives us ground-truth OD patterns and full experimental control. The analysis results show that with our method it is possible to reliably reconstruct OD matrices even from very small data samples (i.e., travel diaries from a small segment of the population) that contain as little as 1% of the population’s movements. This is promising for real-life applications where the amount of empirical data is also limited.

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Model-based predictive signal control is a popular method to pro-actively control traffic and to reduce the effects of congestion in urban networks. In combination with structure-free controllers, which adapt signal settings in arbitrary order and combination (no imposed cycles), these predictive control methods have a high potential to increase system performance by adapting to individual vehicle patterns, which are increasingly available due to new technology. However, most of these control methods assume perfect predictions, while in practice there are prediction errors due to various reasons. In this paper, the sensitivity of the system performance to these prediction errors is analyzed, for an urban corridor with spillback. In a microscopic simulator, first the ideal world is created for the structure-free model-based predictive signal controller, in which perfect predictions are made and the controller can reach its optimal performance. Then prediction errors are introduced in this perfect world, distinguished in aggregation errors that arise using a macroscopic prediction model and biases that represent structural errors in the prediction model or in its demand and state input. The effects of these prediction errors on the system performance are analyzed, as a function of the prediction horizon and update frequency of the control system. The results show that, even under errors, longer prediction horizons lead to better performance, up to a certain optimal prediction horizon length. A high update frequency dampens the influence of prediction errors, enabling the structure-free controller to correct mistakes faster. However, there remains a significant performance loss due to aggregation errors and biases in the prediction model, indicating a promising performance gain of more reliable predictions and the incorporation of information on individual vehicles in future control applications. Moreover, for all model quantities one direction of the bias has more impact on the system performance than the other direction, indicating guidelines towards a more robust control system that suffers less from erroneous predictions.

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The comparably low driving ranges of battery electric vehicles (BEV) cause time-consuming recharging stops if long distances have to be covered. Thus, navigation systems not only have to compute routes leading from the BEV's current position to the destination, but also to plan recharging stops. This type of routing problem is often modeled as a constrained shortest path problem. The constraint ensures that the BEV does not run out of energy. In this paper, a de facto deterministic reformulation of this problem type is suggested, which allows handling uncertainty-particularly the risks resulting from imperfect energy consumption predictions. For this purpose, a certain part of the battery capacity is used as an energy buffer. Different approaches to dynamically optimize the size of this energy buffer in dependency of the expected level of uncertainty are proposed and a corresponding modification of a typical routing algorithm is described. Furthermore, a simulation study is conducted showing that the described framework allows keeping the probability to run out of energy close to zero (for the test settings: < 0.5%) as long as a suitable approach for defining the size of the energy buffer is applied.

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