Modeling road surface potholes within the macroscopic flow framework

Abstract

The continual wearing of road surfaces results to crack and holes called potholes. These road surface irregularities often elongate travel time. In this paper, a second-order macroscopic traffic model is therefore proposed to account for these road surface irregularities that affect the smooth flow of vehicular traffic. Though potholes do vary in shape and size, for simplicity the paper assumes that all potholes have conic resemblances. The impact of different sized potholes on driving is experimented using fundamental diagrams. Besides, the width of these holes, driver reaction time amid these irregularities also determine the intensity of the flow rate and vehicular speed. Moreover, a local cluster analysis is performed to determine the effect of a small disturbance on flow. The results revealed that the magnitude of amplification on a road surface with larger cracks is not as severe as roads with smaller size holes, except at minimal and jam density where all amplifications quickly fade out.