Critical density of urban traffic

Abstract

A modified version of the Intelligent Driver Model was used to simulate traffic in the district of Afogados, in the city of Recife, Brazil, with the objective to verify whether the complexity of the underlying street grid, with multiple lane streets, crossings, and semaphores, is capable of exhibiting the effect of critical density: appearance of a maximum in the vehicle flux versus density curve. Numerical simulations demonstrate that this effect indeed is observed on individual avenues, while the phase offset among the avenues results in damping of this effect for the region as a whole.