Influence of Micro Electric Vehicles in Traffic on an Urban Network. Case study for Avenida da Liberdade

• Autor(a) principal: Dray, Francisco Simões Ramos da Fonseca
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/158893
• topic: Urban mobility; traffic; micro electric car; simulation; SUMO; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia do Ambiente

Today’s urban mobility system relies mainly on the internal combustion car. Despite improving personal mobility, supporting growth and prosperity, and being appropriate for transporting multiple passengers over long distances, it introduces significant side effects: Congestion, accidents, noise, air pollution, social exclusion, land fragmentation, and energy security concerns. Excessive car use in the urban en-vironment leads to severe space consumption problems and causes significant time loss in traffic for commuters. Micro electric cars (MEVs) have been receiving rising attention due to their capacity to mitigate several inefficiencies. The ability to bring both electrification, so reducing air, noise pollution, and CO2 emis-sions; and size reduction, nearing the benefits of micro-mobility and discarding many of the problems related to space inefficiency (due to their small spatial footprint); make this vehicle an attractive solu-tion. The present work investigates the potential influence of MEVs on traffic by using a microsimulation traffic software, SUMO. An urban network in the city of Lisbon was modeled and populated with six different traffic scenarios. The first scenario comprises the “standard” traffic; the following scenarios replace a percentage of conventional passenger cars with MEVs. The rate of MEVs is increased from 0% (first scenario) to 100% in 20% increments, while the opposite trend happens with conventional passenger cars. The metrics average waiting time, average trip speed, average time loss, and average trip duration are evaluated. The results showed that micro electric vehicles have a positive effect on traffic in an urban context. Regarding the average speed of the vehicles in traffic, the thesis concluded that an increasing number of MEVs in traffic is proportional to an increase in the average trip speed. With respect to time spent in traffic, the metrics duration, time loss, and waiting time decrease with the insertion of MEVs in the network.