Possible Explanations of Phase Transitions in Highway Traffic

POSSIBLE EXLANATIONS OF PHASE TRANSITIONS IN HIGHWAY TRAFFIC

C.F. Daganzo, M.J. Cassidy, and R.L. Bertini

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and
Institute of Transportation Studies
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A.

(May 25, 1998)

ABSTRACT

It is shown that all the phase transitions in and out of freely flowing traffic reported earlier for a German site could be caused by bottlenecks, as are all the transitions observed at two other sites examined here. The evidence suggests that bottlenecks cause these transitions in a predictable way, and does not suggest that stoppages (jams) appear spontaneously in free flow traffic for no apparent reason. It is also shown that many of the complicated instability phenomena observed at all locations can b e explained qualitatively in terms of a simple Markovian theory specific to traffic that does not include spontaneous transitions into the queued state as a feature.

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POSSIBLE EXLANATIONS OF PHASE TRANSITIONS IN HIGHWAY TRAFFIC

C.F. Daganzo, M.J. Cassidy, and R.L. Bertini Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Institute of Transportation Studies University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A. (May 25, 1998)

ABSTRACT

Document maintained on server: http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/ Last update 6/21/99

C.F. Daganzo, M.J. Cassidy, and R.L. Bertini

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and
Institute of Transportation Studies
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A.

(May 25, 1998)

Document maintained on server: http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/
Last update 6/21/99