Structure of the Transition Zone Behind Freeway Queues

Observations of freeway traffic flow are usually quite scattered about an underlying curve when plotted versus density or occupancy. Although increasing the sampling intervals can reduce the scatter, whenever an experiment encompasses a rush hour with transitions in and out of congestion, some outlying data stubbornly remain beneath the "equilibrium" curve. The existence of these non-equilibrium points is an ill-understood phenomenon that appears to contradict the simple kinematic wave (KW) model of traffic flow. This paper provides a tentative explanation of the phenomenon, based on experimental evidence. The evidence was a queue that grew and receded over two detector stations, generating typical flow-density scatter-plots at both locations. The locations were far from other interacting traffic streams. The data revealed that a transition zone where vehicles decelerated gradually existed immediately behind the queue. The transition zone was quite wide (about 1 km at both locations), moved slowly (approximately with the "shock" velocityof KW theory) and spent many minutes over each detector station. Disequilibrium flow-density points arose only when the transition zone was over the detectors, suggesting that the transition zone explains their occurrence. The disequilibrium points drifted gradually from one branch of the curve to the other, as KW theory would have predicted if "shocks" had a characteristic width equal to the dimension of the transition zone. Nothing was found in the data to contradict this view. The paper also shows that if one neglects the shocks' physical dimension, the resulting errors are unimportant for practical purposes. Thus, it appears that KW theory can predict traffic behavior at the back of queues when the lanes at the back of the queue are equally attractive to all drivers.