Article ID: | iaor2003587 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 35A |
Issue: | 10 |
Start Page Number: | 881 |
End Page Number: | 894 |
Publication Date: | Dec 2001 |
Journal: | Transportation Research. Part A, Policy and Practice |
Authors: | Cassidy Michael J., Windover John R. |
Certain details of traffic evolution were studied along a 2 km, homogeneous freeway segment located upstream of a bottleneck. By comparing (transformed) cumulative curves constructed from the vehicle counts measured at neighboring loop detectors, it was found that waves propagated through queued traffic like a random walk with predictable statistical variation. There was no observed dependency of wave speed on flow. As such, these waves neither focused nor fanned outward and shocks arose only at the interfaces between free-flowing traffic and the back of queues. Although these traffic features may have long been suspected, actual observations of this kind have hitherto not been documented. Also of note, the shocks separating queued and unqueued traffic sometimes exhibited unexpectedly long transitions between these two states. Finally, some observations presented here corroborate earlier reports that, in unqueued traffic, vehicle velocity is insensitive to flows and that forward-moving changes in traffic states therefore travel with vehicles. Taken together, these findings suggest that certain rather simple models suffice for describing traffic on homogeneous freeway segments; brief discussion of this is offered in Section 5.