Quantitative analysis of developments in motor vehicle kilometres, road fatality and emission rates per kilometrage show that the development of road traffic is characterised by an adaptive evolution. This adaptive evolution of the road traffic system seems to be governed by the same 'laws' as for biological and other self-organising system evolutions. Regarding the technological traffic growth as growth of a socioeconomic driven self-organising system, the similarities with biological evolutions become evident. The difference is that the adaptation and growth of road traffic is not driven by trial and error survivability selections of random mutations, but by the socioeconomic utility of purposeful selected applications of technological innovations. As in biological systems, traffic growth and adaptation are inherently related. The larger the volume of self-organising systems, the smaller the probability of adverse outcomes of its system operations. The modelling of the adaptive evolution of road traffic mainly consists of time-dependent S-shaped growth and exponentially reducing adverse outcome probabilities as adaptation. Such growth and adaptation define the macroscopic development of the adverse outcomes to be single peaked. The validity of this modelling has been shown by analyses of rather long time-series for road traffic growth, road fatality rates and fatalities in many countries. Now it also is shown here to be applicable for the time-series analyses of road traffic emission levels and rates per kilometrage. It is conjectured that this adaptive evolution holds for industrial productions as well. For the covering abstract see ITRD E116488.
Abstract