A unified follow-the-leader model for vehicle, bicycle and pedestrian traffic

•A universal behavior mechanism is revealed for human-driven traffic.•The fundamental diagrams of car, bicycle and pedestrian traffic can be unified through a single scaled speed-spacing equation.•A universal social force model is constructed to reproduce the experimental results.

In this research we performed new bicycle and pedestrian experiments to supplement data extracted from existing follow-the-leader experiments in vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians, and studied their spacetime trajectories and flow-density (or spacing-velocity) phase diagrams. The strong similarities in the spacetime trajectories and the bi-variate phase plots as well as the relative consistence of the estimated proportionality parameter across all three types of traffic, suggest that a unified behavioral mechanism is at play in human-driven traffic. It is suggested that this mechanism is essentially a safety-driven behavior that vehicles, bicycles or pedestrians adopt a safe speed for a given spacing between them. This behavior is well described by a well-known model in vehicular traffic and it is shown in this paper that a scaled version of this model applies to all three types of traffic. A unified relaxation-driven social force traffic model is then proposed to incorporate this behavior mechanism. Simulations with the same setup as the real-life experiments were carried out for vehicle, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic using the unified traffic model and the simulated spacetime trajectories and fundamental diagrams show remarkable consistence with the experimental results.