Ben's Civil
Engineering page
Ben's Electrical Engineering page
This page illustrates wave propagation on freeways. In the extreme, such waves take on the form of stop and go traffic. All of the data shown here come from real traffic, having been reduced by hand from video. Click on the following links to see different animations from a bird's eye view:
Where did this data come from? It was all reduced from video by hand. Here
are two sample frames from the video:
Note that the I-680 data came from the second lane from the right.
For more shock waves, see: Coifman, B. Time
Space Diagrams for Thirteen Shock Waves, working paper, University
of California - PATH, 1997.
The following image shows a shock wave that one might encounter during rush
hour. The yellow lines are individual vehicle trajectories and the underlying
color code ranges from black=0 mph to blue=40 mph.
Ben's Civil
Engineering page
Ben's Electrical Engineering page
