Assessing the impact of Autonomous Vehicles on urban noise pollution

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 simulation-based 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 extra-urban routes, due to the higher capacity impact of AVs on highways, with a consequent load reduction for intra-urban 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 intra-urban roads.