Fundamental Empirical Features of Traffic Breakdown

摘要

Traffic researchers have developed a huge number of traffic theories for optimization and control of traffic and transportation networks. In particular, to generally accepted fundamentals and methodologies of traffic and transportation theory belong the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) model, the General Motors (GM) model class in which traffic breakdown is explained by a free flow instability through a driver reaction time as firstly discovered in the Herman, Gazis et al. car-following model (see references in [1-3]), principles for traffic and transportation network optimization and control in which travel cost should be minimized (examples are Wardrop's user equilibrium (UE) and system optimum (SO) principles) or principles for the maximization of green wave bandwidth in a city (see references in [4-6]). These theories have made a great impact on the understanding of traffic and transportation as well as many engineering applications. However, as we show in this article, there is a problem for these generally accepted traffic and transportation theories in the explanation of real traffic and, therefore, in the effectively of their application for the solving of traffic and transportation problems.