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There has been a debate in the transportation research community over the validity of a class of traffic flow models. These models have the peculiar property that one of its characteristic speeds is faster than that of vehicular traffic. This note attempts to provide an overview of the diverging views on how to interpret this property, and specific comments on the interpretation of Helbing and Johansson [ On the controversy around Daganzo’s requiem for and Aw-Rascle’s resurrection of second-order traffic flow models, Eur. Phys. J. B (2009), DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2009-00182-7]. We showed that having faster-than-traffic characteristics does produce counterintuitive predictions, and they cannot be explained away by a linear stability analysis. As such, the existence of such characteristics must be justified by the physics of traffic, and verified through empirical observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven many-particle systems with nonlinear interactions are known to often display multi-stability, i.e. depending on the respective initial condition, there may be different outcomes. Here, we study this phenomenon for traffic models, some of which show stable and linearly unstable density regimes, but areas of metastability in between. In these areas, perturbations larger than a certain critical amplitude will cause a lasting breakdown of traffic, while smaller ones will fade away. While there are common methods to study linear instability, non-linear instability had to be studied numerically in the past. Here, we present an analytical study for the optimal velocity model with a stepwise specification of the optimal velocity function and a simple kind of perturbation. Despite various approximations, the analytical results are shown to reproduce numerical results very well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution compares several different approaches allowing one to derive macroscopic traffic equation directly from microscopic car-following models. While it is shown that some conventional approaches lead to theoretical problems, it is proposed to use an approach reminding of smoothed particle hydrodynamics to avoid gradient expansions. The derivation circumvents approximations and, therefore, demonstrates the large range of validity of macroscopic traffic equations, without the need of averaging over many vehicles. It also gives an expression for the “traffic pressure”, which generalizes previously used formulas. Furthermore, the method avoids theoretical inconsistencies of macroscopic traffic models, which have been criticized in the past by Daganzo and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]