Achievements of Empirical Studies of Traffic Breakdown at Highway Bottlenecks

Abstract

Traffic breakdown is almost daily observed in traffic networks of any industrial country of the world. As already emphasized in the book introduction (Sect. 1.1), traffic breakdown is a transition from free flow to congested traffic. Therefore, highway capacity of free flow is limited by traffic breakdown. Traffic breakdown with resulting traffic congestion occurs usually at a road bottleneck. Thus, to understand the nature of highway capacity of real traffic, empirical features of traffic breakdown at a highway bottleneck should be known. The objective of this chapter is a discussion of some of important achievements of empirical studies of traffic breakdown at highway bottlenecks in real measured traffic data.