New York City Connected Vehicle Pilot

Overview

The New York City Connected Vehicle Pilot Program (NYC CVPD), led by the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT), will use vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) DSRC communications to improve safety through the reduction of vehicle and pedestrian crashes, injuries, and fatalities.

This deployment involves the development of applications that provide drivers with alerts designed to help them avoid crashes or reduce the severity of the incident. As part of the project, thousands of city-owned vehicles and taxis are being equipped with CV technology, and road side units are being installed in Manhattan and along Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

The city is also working with pedestrian advocacy groups and will be deploying an application that supports visually impaired pedestrians as they navigate the city, providing information about the intersection and the signal timing to aid them in crossing streets. Researchers at NYU are working with NYCDOT and other partners on this portion of the NYC CV Pilot, as well as on safety performance evaluation of the CV technology deployment.

CV Pilot Pedestrian Applications

The Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment project for NYC is primarily focused on using DSRC (Dedicated Short-Range Communications) technology and the Connected Vehicle message set standards to reduce the frequency and severity of crashes between instrumented vehicles (V2V) and between instrumented vehicles and CV equipped intersections (V2I). The NYC CVPD will deploy two pedestrian oriented applications, one of which is intended to assist visually impaired pedestrians in safely crossing the streets at signalized intersections.

The project will equip selected pedestrians with a Personal Information Devices (PID) that describe the current status of the traffic signals and the geometric details of the intersection.

Researchers at C2SMART are managing the pedestrian application interaction and performance metric evaluation of this project. This includes procurement and management of devices, pedestrian coordination and training to use devices, and database management. The IRB certification to carry out the research was obtained and all the researchers in this project are IRB certified.

Safety Performance Evaluation

The CV Pilot project area encompasses three distinct areas in the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Multiple vehicles including taxi & limousine, sanitation trucks, MTA buses, commercial vehicles, and pedestrians will be equipped with CV devices.

The C2SMART Center will be in charge of the safety performance evaluation component of this project. Using both stimulated and observed Connected Vehicles data, there will be both before and after studies conducted. For the simulation, the main study area will be Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

Time-to-collision, a commonly used safety performance evaluation measure, will be calculated and used in this project as an indicator for safety.