Understanding of attractive and repulsive force-components in vehicular microstructure

Abstract

Studying recent empirical traffic data, we show surprising statistical anomalies in the traffic microstructure that can not be explained by current scientific approaches used in physics of traffic. We quantify these anomalies mathematically and explain their cause. We show that all these anomalies can be substantiated by an occurrence of attractive force-components in the model. This approach (in addition to the explanation of the statistical properties in vehicular microstructure) also makes it possible to detect conditions in real traffic flows, under which the attractive stimuli between drivers are considerable. The detected sub-area of fundamental map (intensity-density ID map), where the presence of strong inter-vehicle attraction stimuli is fully manifested, perfectly matches an intuitive idea of dynamic processes hidden in decision-making of drivers.