TRAFFIC FLOW

THEORY
What is traffic flow theory?
• the study of interactions between travellers (includ-
ing pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and their vehicles)
and infrastructure (including highways, signage, and
traffic control devices), with the aim of understand-
ing and developing an optimal transport network
with efficient movement of traffic and minimal
traffic congestion problems.
A Brief History
👉Dawn of 1950's
- John Glen instigate the evolving discipline known
as traffic flow theory using mathematical and statisti-
cal ideas.
- Fluid-dynamic model (LWR model)
👉1960's
- field evolved even further with the advent of the
early personal computers (computing units).
- more control-oriented methods.
A Brief History
👉1970 & 1980 -suddenly stops
👉1990 revived - appealing simplicity of the LWR
model, statistical physics, many models quickly found
its way to the transportation community.
Microscopic Traffic flow
👉Microscopic traffic flow models simu-
late single vehicle-driver units, so the dy-
namic variables of the models represent
microscopic properties like the position
and velocity of single vehicles.
Speed
MACROSCOPIC TRAFFIC
FLOW
👉When considering many vehicles simul-
taneously, the time-space diagramcan be
used to faithfully represent all traffic.
A time-space diagram showing several
vehicle trajectories and three measure-
ment regions Rt, Rs, and Rt,s. These rect-
angular regions are bounded in time and
space by a measurement period Tmp and
a road section of length K. The black dots
represent the individual measurements.
Rt corresponding to measurements at a single
fixed location in space (dx), during a certain
time period Tmp. An example of this is a single
inductive loop detector (SLD) embedded in
the road’s concrete.
Rs corresponding to measurements at a single
instant in time (dt), over a certain road section
of length K. An example of this is an aerial
photograph.
Density
The macroscopic characteristic called density allows
us to get an idea of how crowded a certain section of
a road is. It is typically expressed in number of
vehicles per kilometre (or mile). Note that the
concept of density totally ignores the effects of traffc
composition and vehicle lengths, as it only considers
the abstract quantity ‘number of vehicles’.
Using the spatial region Rs, the density k for single-
lane traffc is defned as:

N -number of vehicles present on the road

segment.
Passenger car units
When considering heterogeneous traffc fows (i.e.,
traffc streams composed of different types of
vehicles), operating agencies usually don’t express
the macroscopic traffic flow characteristics using the
raw number of vehicles, but rather employ the no-
tion of passenger car units (PCU).