Connected vehicles could greatly reduce carbon emissions in shared mobility

Abstract

Mobile communication technologies accelerate the development of intelligent transportation by providing connectivity among vehicles and other vehicles, roadside infrastructures, and cloud platforms, thus creating opportunities to achieve carbon neutrality by promoting intelligent shared mobility. Here, we construct a city-level carbon emission model to quantitatively analyze the relationship between emissions and shared mobility based on a series of trips in several cities. Additionally, vehicle dispatching and urban road planning at low carbon cost are considered. We test our model on a dataset of over 17.6 million trips in five metropolises. Our method yields a reduction in carbon emissions compared with that obtained with the original method and dataset. This difference mainly results from the decrease in vehicle miles traveled via ridesharing and the reduction in energy consumption resulting from vehicle platooning. Although the analysis results depend on a number of assumptions, they are proven robust and could become even more relevant with the ongoing development of autonomous mobility and network intelligence.