A fiber bundle model of traffic jams

We apply the equal load-sharing fiber bundle model of fracture failure in composite materials to model the traffic failure in a system of parallel road network in a city. For some special distributions of traffic handling capacities (thresholds) of the roads, the critical behavior of the jamming transition can be studied analytically. This has been compared with that for the asymmetric simple exclusion process in a single channel or road. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.