The night driving behavior in a car-following model

In this paper, we have studied the night driving behaviors in the car-following model in periodic boundary conditions. The evolution of uniform traffic under both small and large perturbations is investigated. The simulations show that the traffic is always unstable when V'< 0 with V the optimal velocity. The traffic clusters, the kink-antikink waves, and the unstable clusters are observed under different sensitivity parameters. Even more interesting phenomenon is observed when the randomness effect is considered. Under large perturbations, it is shown that the traffic will be unstable if its density is smaller than a threshold. The density corresponding to the threshold increases with the decrease of the sensitivity parameter values. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.