Failure of classical traffic flow theories: a critical review

Abstract

We explain that the fundamental empirical basis for automatic driving, reliable control and optimization of traffic and transportation networks is the set of empirical features of traffic breakdown at a road bottleneck. We show why generally accepted traffic and transportation theories and models are not consistent with this empirical fundament of traffic science. In particular, these classical traffic theories are as follows: In turn, this can explain why dynamics network optimization and control approaches based on these classical traffic flow theories failed by their applications in the real world. We discuss why rather that the assumption about the existence of stochastic highway capacity, at any time instant there should be the infinite number of highway capacities within a range of the flow rate between a minimum capacity and a maximum capacity as assumed in three-phase theory introduced by the author. Because the assumption about the infinite number of highway capacities is consistent with the set of the fundamental empirical features of traffic breakdown at highway bottlenecks, this can be considered a theoretical fundament for the development of reliable automatic driving, control and optimization of vehicular traffic and transportation networks. We discuss briefly some features of the three-phase theory explaining the empirical fundament of transportation science.