Universality in multispecies traffic

TL;DR

This paper reveals that multispecies traffic exhibits universal nonequilibrium behavior akin to directed percolation, providing a new theoretical framework for understanding traffic heterogeneity through massive data and a nonequilibrium model.

Contribution

It introduces a nonequilibrium universality class for multispecies traffic, linking traffic heterogeneity to directed percolation phenomena, a novel approach in transportation science.

Findings

Traffic behaves like water percolating through porous media.

A phase transition exists between disordered and ordered traffic states.

Nonlinear stochastic effects explain experimental data scatter.

Abstract

Understanding the nature of traffic heterogeneity is of major importance, given the widespread adoption of micromobility in cities. Based on massive field data and a nonequilibrium model, we demonstrate that heterogeneous, multispecies traffic is a member of an inherently nonequilibrium universality class associated with porous flows, namely directed percolation (DP) in one spatial dimension. Our central finding is that, macroscopically, multispecies traffic behaves like water percolating through a porous medium. This hypothesis remained unresolved for years mainly due to the incompatibility of equilibrium approaches with phenomena that are quite far from equilibrium and the limited resonance of complexity theory in the transportation literature. DP entails the existence of a nontrivial phase transition from a disordered subcritical phase to an ordered supercritical phase that depends on a temperature-like control parameter and is governed by a universal power-law. Our model explains the large scatter found in experimental data by taking into account the nonlinear, stochastic perturbations present in multispecies traffic configurations due to coupling of a predominantly lane-based host system with a layer of lane-free parasitic flows.