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Canberra Autonomous Car Simulation


This is a simple simulation of the operational characteristics of an autonomous car fleet in Canberra. It investigates the performance of such a fleet providing the transport needs of citizens under a variety of conditions using parameters which you may specify yourself.

The computational requirements of this model are much larger than a normal web page. Even using a modern browser on the latest desktop hardware, it may take a minute or two to run. A system running the equivalent of a Core-i5 or i7 processor with 4GB of memory and the most recent version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari or IE10/IE11/Edge is recommended.

More information about this simulation is available here.

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Default 2022 Model

Passenger stats

Wait stats

Fleet stats

Power stats

Financials

Intertown person-journey counts

Journey and Transfer Trace

Trip Trace

Select types of trip, direction and hour to show. Auto play automatically advances the hour.

Only the most travelled 300 (ie, about 2.5%) of source-destination suburb pairs for any hour are shown.

Note: connections between suburbs are shown here "as the crow flies", but the simulated journeys follow road routes.

Type of trips Passenger journeys
Transfers
Travel Direction North to South
South to North
Both
Hour
Auto play
 


Random car trace

Details of each car are
shown in the table below.

Green: journey
Yellow: transfer
Red: to charger

1st car -
2nd car -
3rd car -
None
 


Car Distribution

Snapshot at the end of the
first minute of the hour.

Blue: pickup/setdown
Red: pending arrival
Orange: charging
Green: idle

Hour
Auto play

Traces of 3 random cars

5% sample of traces of visits to a lucky suburb

Town/suburb summary

Choose from one of these presets and/or roll your own

Cars

Fleet size, excluding spares:
More cars means fewer & shorter peak waits but greater underultisation outside peaks. more
Purchase cost: $
Excludes acquistion and commissioning costs. more
Residual Value: $
Value of car at end of life after disposal costs. more
Useful Life: months
Number of months in the fleet. more
Financing interest rate: %
Cost of funds used to purchase cars (and chargers). more
Per-km costs: cents/km
Cleaning and charging labour costs, tyres, general maintenance and repairs per km travelled more
Annual non per-km costs: $
Fixed annual costs for insurance, registration, comms, fleet management and contingencies. more
Real-world Maximum Range: km
This simulation charges to only 80% of this value, so actual range will be 80% of this. It also recharges when 25% of range is remaining. more
Energy usage per km: Wh/km
The average energy used for all purposes (drivetrain, A/C, lights, compute etc) to travel 1 km. more
Passenger capacity:
The maximum number of passengers per car. more
Spares purchased: %
Additional cars kept as spares as a % of the cars on the road. more

Charging

Number of chargers:
More are required for more cars, smaller car range, smaller charge rate. more
Charge power: kW
3.3kW is a common domestic rate, 120kW-250kW is Tesla supercharger rate. Affects charge time (and hence number of chargers) and grid connection capacity requirements. more
Purchase cost: $
Cost to purchase and install charger. more
Useful Life: months
Number of months before replacement. more
Annual Costs: $
Rental, repairs, admin etc per charger. more
Cost of electricity per kWHr: $
Same bulk rate as an aluminium smelter? Or maybe 0.20 from renewables? more

Journeys

Journeys per day:
1.1 million is a reasonable guess of passenger vehicle journey demand in 2022. more
Per hour distribution:
Set the relative journey loads by hour. more

Fares

Peak flag fall: $
Flag fall for peak period journey. more
Peak per km rate: $
Fare for each km of peak period journey. more
Off-peak flag fall: $
Flag fall for off-peak period journey. more
Off-peak per km rate: $
Fare for each km of off-peak period journey. more

Other

Annual Fixed System cost: $M
Fixed annual cost of running the system, unrelated to number of cars. more
Name: Optionally provide a name for this combination of parameters.

The graph shows the number of journeys starting each minute of the day. Those journeys starting within 1 minute of being requested are shown in blue, delayed journeys in grey. The graph resolution is such that the data shown represents average activity for 5 minutes.

The text shows the number of journeys, and the peak/off-peak split. It also shows the average occupancy of cars over the entire day. Note that a journey may be comprised of several legs; the occupancy table reports data for legs.

The graph shows an area graph of wait times exceeding 1 minute for each minute of the day against the left axis and the percentage of journeys starting within 1 minute of being requested against the right axis. The graph resolution is such that the data shown represents average activity for 5 minutes.

The text shows the distribution of wait times as an absolute number and percentage over the entire day. It also summaries the percentages of journeys with wait times exceeding 1 minute and 3 minutes, and shows the average wait time for all journeys which had a wait time exceeding 1 minute.


Creative Commons Licence
Canberra Autonomous Car Simulation by Kent Fitch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.