Here is another bird's eye view from I-680 of a longer shock wave. Actually, there are two shock waves, first a slow wave then a stop wave, in this sequence.

The animation on the left shows a shock wave on a freeway from a bird's eye view. This is stop and go traffic in action, note how the disturbance (i.e., the stop wave) travels against the stream of traffic. The figure on the right shows the corresponding vehicle trajectories in the time space diagram. Each vertical slice from the time space diagram corresponds to a frame of the animation.

This sequence was reduced by hand from video, follow this link for a sample frame: I-680 test site


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