Traffic flow theory

- traffic flow can be measured or quantified in an analogous manner to fluid mechanics

- Essentially two primary flow conditions
- Uninterrupted flow
- Influenced by roadway characteristics and vehicle interactions
- Interrupted flow
- Influenced by traffic control devices
Uninterrupted flow
Traffic stream characteristics
- three interrelated characteristics can be used to measure the quality or level of service of
a roadway
- Speed : denoted by either u or s.
- Higher speeds are indicative of better quality of service
- Flow : q or Vp(volume)
- How many vehicles are actually moving along a road facility
- The more traffic is moving the higher the level of flow
- Density : k or D
- How concentrated traffic is as we get towards free flowing conditions
where there’s no traffic on the roadway and service is relatively high to
very dense flow we’re approaching traffic jam conditions
Traffic speed
- speed of a vehicle i, Ui, is the distance traveled during a specific time period
- Instantaneous speed is Ui=dx/dt or (X2-X1)/(t2-t1)
- When trying to assess the performance of a road facility, we like to focus on average
speed which gives us A General assessment of how well traffic is flowing as a whole on
a given facility.
- 2 measures common to traffic engineering
- Time mean speed
- Space mean speed
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Time mean speed
- Ut, arithmetic mean speed of vehicles passing a fixed point on a highway over some
time interval it is obtained by averaging the speeds of vehicles over the time period.
- Feet per seconds or miles per hour
- One drawback is this does not give us the best representation of how well traffic is
actually performing on a facility because when we measure time mean speed we are
essentially just measuring this one spot on our road network.
Space mean speed
- Us, is the harmonic mean speed of vehicles passing a fixed point on a highway over
some time interval. It is obtained by dividing the total distance traveled by these vehicles
over the total time period.
Traffic flow
- q, the rate at which vehicles pass a point on a highway during a given time period
Time headway
 - i, h​i ,​ the time elapsed between arrivals of consecutive vehicles generally measured bet.
Front bumpers
- A measure of how much time it takes between the arrival of successive vehicles
- The summation of headways for all vehicles during a time period is simply equal to the
observation time period
Traffic density
- k, the number of vehicles traveling over a specific length of highway at any given time
- Vehicles per mile
Space headway
- d, is the actual physical distance between the front bumper of successive vehicles.
- miles per vehicle or feet per vehicle
Measuring traffic flow: Presence detection
- signalized intersection : has an inductive loop under the pavement which creates an
electromagnetic field and when a vehicle approaches and passes that point it will send a
message to the detector that a vehicle is present. as soon as the vehicle clears that
distance, the sensor will then deactivate.
- Speed = (veh. Length + detector length)/ time on detector
Measuring traffic flow: Pulse detection
- has pneumatic tubes which function as when vehicles are passing over them, there’s a
pulsive error that sends to the monitoring device that says a vehicle has passed through
the detector.
- Speed = wheel base/time between pulses
Measuring traffic flow: Intelligent transportation systems (ITS)
- vehicle communicating with one another, we have vehicles communicating with the
roadside infrastructure, we are also collecting data from cellphones where you have cell
companies that are continuously monitoring vehicles through the use of cellphones.
Occupancy
- portion of time during which vehicles are over a detector

Shockwaves
- stop and go traffic. You have two lanes going through and an on ramp if the flow on
those two lanes upstream the merge below the capacity of those two lanes, the
additional traffic from the on ramp is enough to tip it so at that point the demand from all
three lanes exceeds the capacity at the bottleneck.
- Smart tramps are designed to allow vehicles enough speed to accelerate speed of
traffic.
- The cars hop over to the next line,
- A vehicle accelerates but there's no gap to move in to
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