Connected Mobility
Sustainability
Sustainability benefits of C-V2X
Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything, or C-V2X, communications will make transportation not only safer and smarter but also more sustainable.
Sustainability has three dimensions: environmental, social and economic.
C-V2X ticks all three boxes:
- Environmental: By helping to make every trip smarter, safer and more efficient, C-V2X helps reduce congestion and accidents, thereby reducing air pollution, noise pollution and energy use.
- Social: Saving lives and avoiding injuries are clear social benefits. By enabling real-time communication between pedestrians, cyclists, traffic infrastructure and moving vehicles, including motorcycles and electric scooters, C-V2X will help avoid accidents that otherwise would result in injuries and deaths.
- Economic: By enabling more efficient mobility, C-V2X will save people and employers billions of man-hours currently wasted in traffic jams. Those man-hours can then be dedicated to more rewarding activities.
C-V2X also enables the growth of autonomous mobility, which in turn offers even greater sustainability benefits, for example mobility-as-a-service offerings.
To learn more, watch the short video or scroll down for more details.
C-V2X and Sustainability in detail
ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS
- Transport still represents about 25% of Europe’s total CO2 emissions. By helping to make every trip smarter, safer and more efficient, C-V2X helpsreduce congestion and accidents, thereby reducing energy use, noise pollution and air pollution.
- C-V2X can help all vehicles operate and deliver people and goods more efficiently, thereby reducing pollution and optimizing the use of valuable energy resources.
- INRIX calculated that each second of reduced delays at traffic signals across the United States would translate to an annual reduction of 800,000 metric tons of CO2.
- Connected vehicle technology can help electric cars calculate an energy-optimised route to a charging station that’s not necessarily the fastest or nearest but requires the least energy to reach.
- Examples of environmental benefits enabled by C-V2X technologies include:
- Current technology permitting smarter routing for all vehicles in both urban and rural areas, for example via automated traffic routing, road, bridge, tunnel and parking availability updates and smart parking.
- Future technology permitting “green waves” for emergency vehicles, cars, trucks, lorries and other vehicles instead of stop-and-go traffic.
- Future technology facilitating manoeuvres and cooperation in traffic.
- For more detailed information, please see TNO’s report for 5GAA on the Environmental Benefits of C-V2X.
SOCIAL BENEFITS
- By enabling real-time communication between pedestrians, cyclists, traffic infrastructure and moving vehicles, including motorcycles, C-V2X will help avoid accidents that otherwise would result in injuries and deaths.
- According to the World Health Organisation, there were 1.35 million traffic deaths globally in 2016, the latest year for which global data are available. Road traffic deaths are a leading cause of death among young people, in particular.
- In the European Union, there were about 20,608 road deaths in 2023, or about 46 road deaths per million inhabitants.
- In the United States, an estimated 40,990 people died in road accidents in 2023. The United States Department of Transportation has set an ambitious goal of zero traffic deaths, in part by leveraging advanced technologies to prevent accidents in the first place.
- It says: “The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Roadway Safety Strategy specifies that zero is the only acceptable number of deaths and serious injuries on our roadways. USDOT is committed to taking substantial, comprehensive action to achieve this goal.”
- By providing real-time hazard notifications and enabling connected cooperative driving, C-V2X makes transportation safer for all road users, including cyclists. As C-V2X makes the roads safer, more people may feel confident in choosing cycling as their primary mode of transportation.
- A U.S. DOT pilot study demonstrated that C-V2X technology can prevent accidents and injury for vulnerable road users.
- Green waves and corridors for emergency vehicles can help save lives and reduce injuries, allowing people to lead longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives.
- Response times are critical for emergency vehicles and first responders to save lives. A 2020 study showed that “green waves” at traffic lights could reduce response times by as much as 30% with little impact on overall traffic conditions.
- By enabling more efficient mobility, C-V2X will save commuters billions of man-hours currently wasted in stressful traffic jams.Those man-hours can be dedicated to more enjoyable and rewarding activities such as doing sports, hobbies, volunteering, education or spending time with friends and family.
- In Europe, the average driver in some cities loses more than 150 hours per year stuck in traffic jams.
- Americans lost as much as 3.4 billion hours in traffic in total in 2021.
- C-V2X helps connect other modes of transport with one another to facilitate a real multi-modal transportation system.
ECONOMIC BENEFITS
- By enabling automated driving and mobility as a service, C-V2X will help create new products and services that help drive more sustainable economic growth.
- For example, anonymous data collected through C-V2X can help governments and policymakers develop more effective infrastructure maintenance programmes and traffic plans.
- By enabling more efficient mobility, C-V2X will save employers and entrepreneurs billions of man-hours currently wasted in traffic jams.Those man-hours can then be dedicated to more rewarding activities.
- For commercial vehicles, C-V2X can help optimise delivery routes and schedules and reduce the number of empty or partially loaded trips. Efficient route management reduces energy use and pollution.
- The deployment of C-V2X technologies in vehicles can increase demand for 5G and future networks, each of which will be more energy-efficient than the technologies they replace.
Want to learn more?
If you want to learn more about the timeline for the introduction of next-generation C-V2X communications technologies, including those with clear environmental benefits, please see our latest C-V2X technology Roadmap here.
