The Moving and ‘Phantom’ Bottlenecks

When a slow-moving vehicle occupies one of the lanes of a multilane highway, it often causes queueing behind it, not unlike one caused by an actual stoppage on that lane. This happens when the traffic flow rate upstream from the slow vehicle exceeds a certain critical value. This situation is defined as the case of the Moving Bottleneck. There are other situations when people caught in a traffic jam slowly advance to the point of a suspected breakdown or other obstruction, only to find out that no such obstruction exists but suddenly the flow of traffic is free and rapid. This situation is defined as that of the Phantom Bottleneck. The authors present a model describing these two situations on the basis of reasonable assumptions about the behavior of drivers whose movement is obstructed by the slow vehicle. Using a phenomenological relationship between flow and concentration, they derive formulas describing the behavior of the moving queue caused by the obstruction. Finally, the authors suggest procedures for validating the model and using it for a rational approach to the design of allowable minimum speeds on highways.