Empirical evidence for a jamming transition in urban traffic

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms leading to the formation and the propagation of traffic jams in large cities is of crucial importance for urban planning and traffic management. Many studies have already considered the emergence of traffic jams from the point of view of phase transitions, but mostly in simple geometries such as highways for example or in the framework of percolation where an external parameter is driving the transition. More generally, empirical evidence and characterization for a congestion transition in complex road networks are scarce, and here, we use traffic measures for Paris (France) during the period 2014–2018 for testing the existence of a jamming transition at the urban level. In particular, we show that the correlation function of delays due to congestion is a power law (with exponent η ≈ 0.4) combined with an exponential cut-off ξ . This correlation length is shown to diverge during rush hours, pointing to a jamming transition in urban traffic. We also discuss the spatial structure of congestion and identify a core of congested links that participate in most traffic jams and whose structure is specific during rush hours. Finally, we show that the spatial structure of congestion is consistent with a reaction–diffusion picture proposed previously.