A Study of Phase Transitions on Multilane Roads in the Framework of Three-Phase Traffic Theory

A numerical study of phase transitions in traffic flow on multilane roads in the framework of three-phase traffic theory is presented. It was found that when vehicle merging became easier at a bottleneck, wide moving jams emerged more frequently in synchronized flow upstream of the bottleneck. Depending on the traffic phase and lane-changing probability, lane changing was responsible for qualitatively opposite effects, such as congested traffic dissolution or, in contrast, the emergence of nuclei for traffic breakdown and moving jam emergence. It was found that at a sequence of closely located adjacent bottlenecks, phase transitions between different road lanes resulted in nonregular spatiotemporal traffic dynamics.