Assessing an automated people mover system in Qatar through traffic microsimulation

Automated People Mover bus systems are considered a key in improving a city's transport system performance, as they can pool several passengers together, resulting in few cars on the roads. Such systems are expected to bloom in later stages of vehicle automation adoption as for the moment their biggest challenge is their co-existence with human-driven vehicles which are essentially unpredictable. The aim of this study is to investigate the interaction of an APM system with the rest of the vehicular traffic of an urban road network and assess its traffic impacts in the transition era towards vehicles’ automation and connectivity. This is achieved through well-defined what-if alternative scenarios that considered different Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) stages, ie. different levels of AV penetration rates and AV technology maturity levels. The results showed that AVs, and specifically the deployment of an APM system, have the potential to contribute positively. This contribution can be reflected twofold; first, as a decrease in the average number of delays associated with the performance of the APM system and second, as a decrease in the average number of stops of the overall transport network performance.