As the nationwide leader for innovative transportation planning, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) is blazing the trail for integration of autonomous vehicles into existing and future transportation investments. Autonomous and connected vehicles have a great potential to both reduce fatalities and provide greater mobility to seniors, helping FDOT achieve its mission of providing a safe transportation system that ensures the mobility of people and goods, enhances the quality of life and preserves the environment. As part of the evaluation of autonomous vehicles, Florida DOT is conducting a series of pilot projects around the state to evaluate the promise and performance of autonomous vehicles.

One pilot test is the evaluation of advanced driver assistance systems. As part of this pilot test, 100 vehicles (ranging from automobiles to transit vehicles) from Florida DOT and transit agencies in the Tampa Bay area have been fitted with Geotab and Mobileye devices. The Geotab devices provide continuous tracking of vehicles and feed into a large database on a continuous basis via cellular signals. The Mobileye devices provide instantaneous feedback on driver behavior allowing for improved safety and efficiency and influence driver behavior. The goal of this pilot project is to determine the impact of these devices on driver behavior and what driver behavior changes can be observed and quantified in a statistical manner.

The focus of this paper is on the methods developed to process these large datasets (each vehicle is tracked continuously and data is recorded based on event changes), the evaluation of the data and ways to visualize the information in a manner that is understandable by policy makers. From a planning perspective, understanding how people drive will have implications on Volume-delay functions and highway capacity values. As the level of automation available in vehicles increases from function specific automation to full self driving automation, these parameters will need to be revised to reflect the shorter headways and coordinated speeds at which vehicles with different levels of automation may be able to operate.