Eur. Phys. J. B 69, 563-568 (2009)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2009-00183-6

Comment on “On the controversy around Daganzo's requiem for and Aw-Rascle's resurrection of second-order traffic flow models" by D. Helbing and A.F. Johansson

What faster-than-traffic characteristic speeds mean for vehicular traffic flow

University of California, Davis, California, 95616, USA

Corresponding author: ^a hmzhang@ucdavis.edu

Received: 28 March 2009
Published online: 3 June 2009

Abstract

There has been a debate in the transportation research community over the validity of a class of traffic flow models. These models have the peculiar property that one of its characteristic speeds is faster than that of vehicular traffic. This note attempts to provide an overview of the diverging views on how to interpret this property, and specific comments on the interpretation of Helbing and Johansson [On the controversy around Daganzo's requiem for and Aw-Rascle's resurrection of second-order traffic flow models, Eur. Phys. J. B (2009), DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2009-00182-7]. We showed that having faster-than-traffic characteristics does produce counterintuitive predictions, and they cannot be explained away by a linear stability analysis. As such, the existence of such characteristics must be justified by the physics of traffic, and verified through empirical observations.