  In the IEEE 802.11p standard addressing vehicular communications, Basic
Safety Messages (BSMs) can be bundled together and relayed as to increase the
effective communication range of transmitting vehicles. This process forms a
vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) for the dissemination of safety information.
The number of "shortest multihop paths" (or geodesics) connecting two network
nodes is an important statistic which can be used to enhance throughput,
validate threat events, protect against collusion attacks, infer location
information, and also limit redundant broadcasts thus reducing interference. To
this end, we analytically calculate for the first time the mean and variance of
the number of geodesics in 1D VANETs.
