Yuki Sugiyama et al 2008 New J. Phys. 10 033001 doi:10.1088/1367-2630/10/3/033001
Traffic jams without bottlenecks—experimental evidence for the physical mechanism of the formation of a jam
Yuki Sugiyama1,10, Minoru Fukui2, Macoto Kikuchi3, Katsuya Hasebe4, Akihiro Nakayama5, Katsuhiro Nishinari6,7, Shin-ichi Tadaki8 and Satoshi Yukawa9
Show affiliationsA traffic jam on a highway is a very familiar phenomenon. From the physical viewpoint, the system of vehicular flow is a non-equilibrium system of interacting particles (vehicles). The collective effect of the many-particle system induces the instability of a free flow state caused by the enhancement of fluctuations, and the transition to a jamming state occurs spontaneously if the average vehicle density exceeds a certain critical value. Thus, a bottleneck is only a trigger and not the essential origin of a traffic jam. In this paper, we present the first experimental evidence that the emergence of a traffic jam is a collective phenomenon like 'dynamical' phase transitions and pattern formation in a non-equilibrium system. We have performed an experiment on a circuit to show the emergence of a jam with no bottleneck. In the initial condition, all the vehicles are moving, homogeneously distributed on the circular road, with the same velocity. The average density of the vehicles is prepared for the onset of the instability. Even a tiny fluctuation grows larger and then the homogeneous movement cannot be maintained. Finally, a jam cluster appears and propagates backward like a solitary wave with the same speed as that of a jam cluster on a highway.
- PACS
- Subjects
- Dates
-
Issue 3 (March 2008)
Received 14 November 2007
Published 4 March 2008
-
Traffic jams without bottlenecks—experimental evidence for the physical mechanism of the formation of a jam
Yuki Sugiyama et al 2008 New J. Phys. 10 033001
-
Toxicity of silver nanoparticles in zebrafish models
P V Asharani et al 2008 Nanotechnology 19 255102
-
Climate volatility deepens poverty vulnerability in developing countries
Syud A Ahmed et al 2009 Environ. Res. Lett. 4 034004
-
Single-Arc IMRT?
Thomas Bortfeld and Steve Webb 2009 Phys. Med. Biol. 54 N9
-
Software techniques for two- and three-dimensional kinematic measurements of biological and biomimetic systems
Tyson L Hedrick 2008 Bioinspir. Biomim. 3 034001
-
Helical latch for scalable Boolean logic operations
R DeMara et al 1994 Nanotechnology 5 137
-
Synthetic biology for nanotechnology
Philip Ball 2005 Nanotechnology 16 R1
-
Improved Measurements of the Temperature and Polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background from QUaD
M. L. Brown et al. 2009 ApJ 705 978
-
Renormalization group approach to error-correcting codes
Jonathan S Yedidia and Jean-Philippe Bouchaud 2003 J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 36 1267
-
Phase coexistence in a forecasting game
Philippe Curty and Matteo Marsili J. Stat. Mech. (2006) P03013
Users also read
What's this?- The Behavior of the Open Magnetic Field of the Sun
- Resonance Overlap Is Responsible for Ejecting Planets in Binary Systems
- A theory of traffic congestion at heavy bottlenecks