Events

Join us for a webinar hosted by the North Carolina Department of Transportation Research and Development Unit on How NCDOT is Taking Steps Toward Planning and Designing for CAVs. Our speaker is Dr. Joe Hummer. The webinar will be on June 6th from 1-2 pm (eastern). Please register at the link provided below.

Webinar Description

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) will change many aspects of the transportation business, and our lifestyles in general.  Steady progress continues toward widespread implementation, with forecasts showing that by 2045 or 2050 large percentages of the traffic on our roads will be CAVs.  The year 2045 is the current NCDOT design year, but to this point we are planning and designing for exactly zero percent CAVs.  That clearly has to change.  NCDOT has begun to take steps toward planning and designing for CAVs, and this webinar will describe three of those steps.  First, NCDOT helped sponsor a research project that developed capacity adjustment factors for different road situations based on the percentage of CAVs in the fleet.  Those factors appeared in the latest edition of the Highway Capacity Manual.  We will review those factors and run through a couple example applications.  Second, NCDOT sponsored a research effort to develop some interim guidance on how increasing CAV percentages will affect demand on our roads.  Will traffic volumes go up, due to the ease of CAV travel and empty-vehicle trips, or will traffic volumes go down, due to trips shifting to off-peak times?  We will review the interim guidance.  Finally, an NCDOT-sponsored research project is just about to get underway to take a deeper dive into the demand side and develop longer-lasting guidance.  We will look at the research methods and look ahead a couple years to how we will use the final product.

Registration 

Key Takeaways

• When can we expect enough CAVs on our roads to matter in planning and design?
• What is NCDOT doing about planning and designing for CAVs?
• When can we expect to implement new methods that include CAVs?
• What else need to be done so that NCDOT is planning and designing for CAVs as well as it can?

The research associated with this presentation was supported by NCDOT through the Transportation Polled Fund Program. Research Report Template (oregon.gov)