A mechanism is unveiled by which congestion forms on a 3-lane, uphill expressway segment, and causes reductions in output flow. Vehicular lane-changing (LC) is key to the mechanism, particularly LC induced by speed disturbances (SDs) that periodically arise in the expressway's median and center...

Spatiotemporal analysis of real freeway traffic reveals that carpool lanes are not as damaging as previously reported. To the contrary, the analysis unveils a surprising benefit of carpool lanes that should be even greater when special lanes are used to segregate very different vehicle classes,...

Traffic data near the junction of a single-lane on-ramp (with a ramp meter) and a three-lane freeway were measured for six weekdays during the rush and studied. On each of these days, the merge became a bottleneck with queue discharge rates that were substantially lower than the flows that had...

A bottleneck with a diminished capacity is shown to have arisen on a freeway segment whenever queues from the segment's off-ramped spilled over and occupied its mandatory exit lane. It is also shown that longer exit queues from the over-saturate off-ramp were accompanied by lower discharge rates...

Offered here is a critique of a simple scheme recently proposed for metering freeway on-ramps. An earlier report of this scheme's potential for reducing commuter delay is shown to be exaggerated. The discussion makes clear that to reduce delay, metering should increase the rates at which...

Traffic data measured near the junction of a single-lane on-ramp (with metered inflows) and a three-lane freeway were carefully studied for four days during the rush. The data showed the area around this merge junction became a bottleneck each day when the on-ramp's meter allowed its inflows to...

The paper explores how the coordination of vehicle schedules in a public transit system affects generalized costs. We consider an idealized system that delivers its users to a common destination by requiring each to transfer from a feeder- to a trunk-line vehicle. Continuum models are used first...

Freeway traffic was observed over multiple days and was found to display certain regular features. Oscillations arose only in queues; they had periods of several minutes; and their amplitudes stabilized as they propagated upstream. They propagated at a nearly constant speed of about 22 to 24...

Data from four merge locations in northern California and Toronto, Canada unveil a notable feature of driver turn taking. We have observed that queued vehicles from the on-ramp and freeway traffic streams enter a congested merge in some (nearly) fixed ratio, independent of the merge outflow....

Measurements taken downstream of freeway/on-ramp merges have verified that discharge flow diminishes when a merge becomes an active bottleneck. We show that metering the on-ramp can recover the higher discharge flow and thereby increase merge capacity. Detailed observations collected using video...