Demonstration of performance-based traffic regulations

The main goal of the demonstration project was to:

• Demonstrate performance-based regulations and traffic decrees in real-world environments.
• Examine and quantify which potential performance-based regulations and traffic decrees have of reducing the environmental impact of heavy transport in cities and urban areas. The goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions per tonne of goods transported in cities and urban areas by at least 30%.
• Describe which equipment will be required and which requirements are intended to be placed on the vehicles' systems and the monitoring systems. This includes solutions for communication and control, such as communication between vehicles and the licensing authority, as well as opportunities for, for example, municipalities to digitally "open" and "close" certain road sections during certain periods for vehicles that meet defined performance parameters.

Field tests and results

In this demonstration project two field tests have been conducted in Stockholm City. One of these involved accessibility in order to identify opportunities to drive longer vehicles and to identify performance parameters relevant to accessibility. The second field test intended to create a basis for investigating how the comfort vibrations are affected by longer and heavier vehicles and to identify which vehicle parameters that affect the vibrations.

Based on information and data from the field tests, supplemented with literature studies and interviews, performance-based regulations have been analyzed on the basis of productivity/efficiency, environment, safety, congestion and impact on the infrastructure.

Among the results you can see that by implementing dynamic performance-based regulations with geofencing that are controlled by digital systems and using shared data, vehicles can be used more efficiently and more energy efficient transport solutions can be created. Field tests indicate that it can lead to an energy efficiency/fuel savings of 10–25 % and that the number of transports will decrease by 30–40 %. A change to performance-based regulations also indicates that the impact from heavy vehicles on noise, congestion and traffic accidents can be reduced.