The future of urban mobility points towards autonomous vehicles. However, widespread adoption of this technology will probably take at least a couple decades. To integrate autonomous vehicles in the regular fleet, designers from Questtonó created the concept of Digital Rails, a traffic solution that assigns exclusive lanes for autonomous vehicles in the regular road network. Digital Rails also rely on traffic signal coordination, which allows the vehicles using the system to travel in platoons, without stops.
This work consists of a scientific evaluation of such proposal focusing on its impacts on the average travel time for vehicles in a large city. To accomplish this, we elaborated traffic simulations based on real data from the city of São Paulo. These simulations were done using InterSCSimulator, a smart-city simulator developed at IME/USP with focus on scalability.