How Routing Strategies Impact Urban Emissions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different routing strategies in navigation apps influence urban carbon emissions, revealing that mixed compliance with routing suggestions and randomness can reduce overall CO2 emissions.

Contribution

The study introduces a simulation framework to evaluate the environmental impact of routing algorithms and identifies strategies that minimize urban CO2 emissions.

Findings

All vehicles following or ignoring routes increase emissions.

Partial adherence with randomness reduces overall CO2 emissions.

Mixed routing strategies can optimize urban environmental impact.

Abstract

Navigation apps use routing algorithms to suggest the best path to reach a user's desired destination. Although undoubtedly useful, navigation apps' impact on the urban environment (e.g., carbon dioxide emissions and population exposure to pollution) is still largely unclear. In this work, we design a simulation framework to assess the impact of routing algorithms on carbon dioxide emissions within an urban environment. Using APIs from TomTom and OpenStreetMap, we find that settings in which either all vehicles or none of them follow a navigation app's suggestion lead to the worst impact in terms of CO2 emissions. In contrast, when just a portion (around half) of vehicles follow these suggestions, and some degree of randomness is added to the remaining vehicles' paths, we observe a reduction in the overall CO2 emissions over the road network. Our work is a first step towards designing next-generation routing principles that may increase urban well-being while satisfying individual needs.