Characterization of the nontrivial and chaotic behavior that occurs in a simple city traffic model

Abstract

Urban traffic is interesting not only due to its obvious social and economical impact, but also due to its complexity. It is not unusual for drivers to get stuck in a traffic jam that apparently emerged from nowhere. A situation like this is believed to emerge from a sudden change in the driving of some vehicle combined with the reaction time of neighboring drivers. In this way, a perturbation induced by some driver will back propagate through the system possibly affecting vehicles far away. In this article, we study the acceleration behavior of a given driver as one of the possible causes leading to a traffic jam. We based the present study on a previous work that showed theoretically the intrinsic chaotic nature of the traffic in cities, and we extend those results to a broader range of accelerations and deceleration ratios. In this way, our simulations suggest that high deceleration/acceleration ratios may be at the root of emergent traffic jams.