%T Assessing the impact of Autonomous Vehicles on urban noise pollution
%O This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
%P 72-82
%D 2019
%L discovery10084531
%N 1
%J Noise Mapping
%V 6
%A SM Patella
%A F Aletta
%A L Mannini
%X This paper presents the results of a noise emission study of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and their impact
on the road network. By comparing the current situation
with a future hypothetical scenario (100% AVs penetration), this study highlights the positive effect, in terms of
noise pollution, of the adoption of AVs on a real road network (city of Rome). For this scope, a traffic simulationbased approach was used to investigate the effects of AVs
on the network congestion. Results show that the full AVs
penetration scenario leads to an improvement in the network performances in terms of travel time and average
network speed. Moreover, the amount of Vehicle Kilometre Travelled (VKT) shows an 8% increase on longer extraurban routes, due to the higher capacity impact of AVs
on highways, with a consequent load reduction for intraurban shortcutting routes. These results are also reflected
in terms of noise emission. In fact, the central area would
benefit from lower noise emission, whereas an increase in
traffic volume and speed lead to worsened conditions for
some specific highway links of the network. Overall, it was
shown that a 100% AVs fleet would have a beneficial effect for the noise pollution, leading to a general reduction
of noise emissions, which is more pronounced for intraurban roads.