Fig. 6: Evolution of the congested upstream clusters associated with congested links.

Here, a and d show the change over time in the size of the congested clusters associated with links in Melbourne’s traffic network, while b and e depict the same results for the null model generated independently for each time step by drawing random λ_i(t)’s for each link i from the same distribution as in the simulated data; links are sorted according to the maximum size of their congested upstream cluster and the results only show the top 1000 links. The distribution of the size of the congested upstream clusters for the Melbourne traffic simulation model and its null model counterpart at t = 180 is compared for c ρ = 0.5 and f ρ = 0.7. Larger congested upstream clusters are observed more frequently in the Melbourne traffic network model compared to the null model generated with the same structure and the same distribution of the link relative velocity.