Effects of anticipatory driving in a traffic flow model

Anticipation in traffic means that drivers estimate their leaders' velocities for future timesteps. In the article a specific stochastic car--following model with non--unique flow--density relation is investigated with respect to anticipatory driving. It is realized by next--nearest--neighbour interaction which leads to large flows and short temporal headways. The underlying mechanism that causes these effects is explained by the headways of the cars which organize in an alternating structure with a short headway following a long one, thereby producing a strong anti-correlation in the gaps or in the headways of subsequent cars. For the investigated model the corresponding time headway distributions display the short headways observed in reality. Even though these effects are discussed for a specific model, the mechanism described is in general present in any traffic flow models that work with anticipation.