Understanding the structure of hyper-congested traffic from empirical and experimental evidences

We study in this paper the structure of traffic under hypercongestion, which is a controversial issue between traditional two-phase traffic theory and Kerner's three-phase theory. By analyzing video traffic data from a section of the Nanjing Airport Highway, it is found that traffic states inside hypercongestion are not homogeneous, which contradicts the existence of a “Homogeneous Congested Traffic” state claimed in two-phase traffic theory. Analysis of vehicle trajectories and velocities obtained from an experimental car-following study with a platoon of 25 vehicles also confirms the above findings. Furthermore, it is also found from the video traffic data that the structure of hypercongested traffic varies only slightly with location, which might be due to small jams inside hypercongested traffic merging into larger ones slowly and/or larger jams sometimes breaking into small ones. Finally, the implications of our observations on traffic modeling have been discussed.