A Virtual Approach to Evaluate Vehicular Flows to Promote Sustainable and Safe Mobility in Small and Smart Communities

A key feature of Smart and Sustainable Mobility regards Road Safety Improvements. One of the big challenges is to make small communities safer and smarter, where the main issue refers to the lack of data availability about mobility and traffic demand. Without these data, applying some sustainable, smart, and safe mobility solutions is quite difficult. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, a methodology to forecast vehicular traffic flow is proposed. The proposed method enables users to evaluate vehicular flows by combining travel times retrieved from a navigation software with the Greenshields, BPR, and free flow speed models. The main advantage of the model is to provide a simple tool to be used for virtual collection of traffic data to be used for the calibration and validation of travel-demand macroscopic and/or microscopic models. The method has been tested in the city of Cassino, providing an agreement with real traffic flows with a satisfactory Pearson coefficient of 0.9216). It is expected that this method could be an important tool in the hands of city managers and professionals in making smarter and safer communities.