Adverse Effects of V2V Adoption on Road Safety

Abstract

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is expected to improve road safety and reduce congestion. However, prior work shows that V2V information sharing under partial adoption may increase congestion and decrease safety. We study whether increasing V2V adoption itself affects road safety. We propose a corrected version of an existing model and analyze its behavior under varying adoption levels. We show that, in some cases, increased V2V adoption can increase accident probability. Moreover, under an optimal signaling policy, the system can ensure that accident probability is non-increasing in the adoption level.