How long does one wait at a traffic congestion?

Subinay Dasgupta

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2021, vol. 574, issue C

Abstract: Suppose a wide road is somehow constricted at one place, allowing only one car at a time. Unless the traffic is very sparse, the vehicles will gather before the constriction and a given car will have to wait till it gets a chance to pass through. At a time which car will exit? Perhaps it is the one, with a driver who can jostle and aggressively put its nose into the constriction. We assume that the quantitative measure of aggressiveness depends on the nature of the individual and increases monotonically with waiting time. Our precise hypothesis is that the aggressiveness of a given driver who has been stranded for time τ, is the product of two quantities N, and τσ, where N is fixed for a given individual but varies randomly from person to person (in the range 0 to 1), while σ is the same for all individuals. We show that this hypothesis leads to the conclusion that the probability of waiting for a time τ is proportional to τσ+1. Although the applicability of our hypothesis to real situations is difficult to verify at microscopic level, we note that empirical studies confirm such algebraic decay with an exponent σ=1.5 and 2.5 in two cities of India and 0.5 for a traffic intersection in Germany. We shall present some justifications for our hypothesis along with some variants and limitations of our model.

Keywords: Traffic congestion; Aggressiveness in driving; Distribution of waiting time (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437121002636
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:574:y:2021:i:c:s0378437121002636

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2021.125991

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().