Potential Impact of Autonomous Vehicles on Reducing Congestion

Traffic congestion is a major problem in large metropolitan areas in the United States. In 2022, on average, a commuter lost about $1,259 in monetary terms annually due to congestion nationwide, which amounts to 8.7 billion lost hours in total. The lack of coordination among individual users, who make routing decisions independently based on current traffic information without anticipating that others may follow similar decision-making patterns, contributes significantly to the high cost of congestion. The behavior of drivers optimizing their individual routes leads to a state known as the User Equilibrium (UE), leading to travel times that can be significantly higher than travel times from the System Optimal (SO), particularly in congested urban networks where the effects of individual decisions cascade throughout the system. With the future emergence of autonomous vehicles, it is possible that organizations may now own more of the fleet of vehicles and control their routing, providing the organization more options for balancing route selections and thus making it possible to find routing solutions closer to the system optimal. Driverless ride-hailing companies such as Waymo have already begun their service in five major cities across the United States and Tesla has started to test their Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. The centralized routing capabilities of these autonomous services have the potential to reduce congestion. This first phase of this research project will develop centralized optimization models to quantify the impact of using autonomous vehicles on ride-hailing platforms in reducing congestion.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $45,000.00
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3551747109

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center

  University of Southern California
  Los Angeles, CA  United States  90089
• Project Managers:

  Hong, Jennifer

• Performing Organizations:

  University of Southern California, Los Angeles

  University Park Campus
  Los Angeles, CA  United States  90089
• Principal Investigators:

  Dessouky, Maged

• Start Date: 20260101
• Expected Completion Date: 20260630
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers Program

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Autonomous vehicles; Optimization; Ridesourcing; Routes and routing; Traffic congestion; Vehicle fleets
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Passenger Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01981628
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center
• Contract Numbers: 69A3551747109
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Mar 3 2026 4:17PM