Metastability in the formation of an experimental traffic jam

Abstract

We show detailed data about the process of jam formation in a traffic experiment on a circuit without any bottlenecks. The experiment was carried out using a circular road on a flat ground. At the initial stage, vehicles are running homogeneously distributed on the circuit with the same velocity, but roughly 10 min later a traffic jam emerges spontaneously on the circuit. In the process of the jam formation, we found a homogeneous flow with large velocity is temporarily realized before a jam cluster appears. The instability of such a homogeneous flow is the key to understanding jam formation.