Search

• We analyze speed impacts of replacing diesel drayage trucks with electric trucks. • We consider diesel and 1,000 hp electric drayage trucks, with or without CACC. • Our study area extends from the Ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach to downtown LA. • We perform traffic simulations for 2012 and 2035 on a network centered on I-710. • New I-710 lanes are not needed when 1,000 hp electric trucks replace diesel trucks. Electrification of trucking combined with connected technologies promise to cut the cost of freight transportation, reduce its environmental footprint, and make roads safer. If electric trucks are powerful enough to cease behaving as moving bottlenecks, they could also increase the capacity of existing roads and reduce the demand for new road infrastructure, a consequence that has so far been understudied. To explore the potential speed changes of replacing conventional heavy-duty drayage trucks with electric and/or connected trucks, we performed microscopic traffic simulations on a network centered on I-710, the country's most important economic artery, between the San Pedro Bay Ports and downtown Los Angeles, in Southern California. In addition to a 2012 baseline, we analyzed twelve scenarios for the year 2035, characterized by three levels of road improvements and four types of heavy-duty port trucks (HDPT). Our results show that 1,000 hp electric/hydrogen trucks (eTs) can be a substitute for additional freeway lanes in busy freight corridors. While conventional HDPTs with CACC would only slightly increase network speeds, replacing conventional HDPTs with eTs and improving selected I-710 ramps should be sufficient to absorb the forecast increases in drayage demand for 2035 without adding a controversial lane to I-710. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for the impacts on speed of new vehicle technologies in infrastructure planning. They also suggest shifting funding from building new capacity to financing 1,000 hp connected electric trucks in freight corridors until the market for these vehicles has matured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transportation system has evolved into a complex cyber-physical system with the introduction of wireless communication and the emergence of connected travelers and connected automated vehicles. Such applications create an urgent need to develop high-fidelity transportation modeling tools that capture the mutual interaction of the communication and transportation systems. This paper addresses this need by developing a high-fidelity, large-scale dynamic and integrated traffic and direct cellullar vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (collectively known as V2X) modeling tool. The unique contributions of this work are (1) we developed a scalable implementation of the analytical communication model that captures packet movement at the millisecond level; (2) we coupled the communication and traffic simulation models in real-time to develop a fully integrated dynamic connected vehicle modeling tool; and (3) we developed scalable approaches that adjust the frequency of model coupling depending on the number of concurrent vehicles in the network. The proposed scalable modeling framework is demonstrated by running on the Los Angeles downtown network considering the morning peak hour traffic demand (145,000 vehicles), running faster than real-time on a regular personal computer (1.5 h to run 1.86 h of simulation time). Spatiotemporal estimates of packet delivery ratios for downtown Los Angeles are presented. This novel modeling framework provides a breakthrough in the development of urgently needed tools for large-scale testing of direct (C-V2X) enabled applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]