Driver behavior following an automatic steering intervention.

The study investigated driver behavior toward an automatic steering intervention of a collision mitigation system. Forty participants were tested in a driving simulator and confronted with an inevitable collision. They performed a naïve drive and afterwards a repeated exposure in which they were told to hold the steering wheel loosely.

Density-feedback control in traffic and transport far from equilibrium.

A bottleneck situation in one-lane traffic flow is typically modelled with a constant demand of entering cars. However, in practice this demand may depend on the density of cars in the bottleneck. The present paper studies a simple bimodal realization of this mechanism to which we refer to as density-feedback control (DFC): If the actual density in the bottleneck is above a certain threshold, the reservoir density of possibly entering cars is reduced to a different constant value.

Fluid-dynamical and microscopic description of traffic flow: a data-driven comparison.

Much work has been done to compare traffic-flow models with reality; so far, this has been done separately for microscopic, as well as for fluid-dynamical, models of traffic flow. This paper compares directly the performance of both types of models to real data. The results indicate that microscopic models, on average, seem to have a tiny advantage over fluid-dynamical models; however, one may admit that for most applications, the differences between the two are small.

Comment on "Analytical investigation of the open boundary conditions in the Nagel-Schreckenberg model".

In their recent paper [Phys. Rev. E 79, 031115 (2009)], Ning Jia and Shoufeng Ma used some Markov chain arguments for the analytical description of inflow in the deterministic Nagel-Schreckenberg model with open boundaries.