Resurrection of "Second Order" Models of Traffic Flow

Abstract

We introduce a new "second order" model of traffic flow. As noted in [C. Daganzo, Requiem for second-order fluid with approximation to traffic flow, Transportation Res. Part B, 29 (1995), pp. 277--286], the previous "second order" models, i.e., models with two equations (mass and "momentum"), lead to nonphysical effects, probably because they try to mimic the gas dynamics equations, with an unrealistic dependence on the acceleration with respect to the space derivative of the "pressure." We simply replace this space derivative with a convective derivative, and we show that this very simple repair completely resolves the inconsistencies of these models. Moreover, our model nicely predicts instabilities near the vacuum, i.e., for very light traffic.