Gaining insight into routing behaviors of emergency vehicle from real-world trajectories

In case of an emergency situation help is needed at the incident location as fast as possible. Therefore emergency vehicles are allowed to use special rights and request priority at intersections. Due to the rising traffic demand in the cities reaching destinations in time is becoming one issue which emergency vehicle drivers have to face. Another issue is that other traffic participants do not realize that an emergency vehicle is approaching or do not know how to react accordingly. Sometimes the traffic infrastructure does not allow emergency vehicles to use their special rights e.g. narrow roads have no space for formatting a corridor for emergency vehicle access. Therefore the fastest routes for normal vehicles might not be also the shortest routes for emergency vehicles. This paper aims to investigate emergency vehicles’ driving manoeuvres and route characters with use of the corresponding trajectory data, collected in Brunswick, Germany, for establishing a respective driving simulation model, which can help emergency vehicle related traffic and routing management. The result shows that 90% of the emergency vehicles can reach their destinations within 15 minutes, while 66% of them can even finish their journeys within 8 minutes. Furthermore, there are differences between the driving manoeuvres of the regular vehicles and the emergency vehicles. Emergency vehicles’ average travel speed at the intersection is higher than other regular vehicles. However, their average speed for the whole journeys is lower than the maximal allowed speed limit. It implies that, if necessary, there is potential to further shorten the journey time by improving the respective traffic and routing management.