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🚗 Phantom Traffic Jams: Stop-and-Go Waves

A 3D ring-road car-following simulation showing how stop-and-go waves spontaneously form from reaction-time delay alone — no crash, no bottleneck, no cause but the traffic itself.

Transport & Urbanism3DModerate60 FPS

A ring-road car-following simulation showing how a self-sustaining traffic jam can form and travel backward through a stream of cars with no crash, no bottleneck, and no cause besides reaction-time delay.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Every car keeps a safety gap proportional to its own speed and reaction time. That built-in delay makes braking always a little late and a little too strong — a small disturbance amplifies into a wave that drifts backward around the ring even though every car keeps moving forward.

🎮 How to Use

Raise vehicle count or reaction time until a red, slow-moving cluster spontaneously appears. Try the "brake one car" button to trigger a wave on demand, then toggle anticipation to see cooperative driving damp it out.

💡 Did You Know?

This reproduces a real 2008 experiment by Yuki Sugiyama's team at Nagoya University, where 22 human drivers on a physical ring road spontaneously formed a stop-and-go jam within minutes — with no obstacle in sight.

⚙ Under the hood

A 3D ring-road car-following simulation showing how stop-and-go waves spontaneously form from reaction-time delay alone — no crash, no bottleneck, no cause but the traffic itself.

traffic simulationwave phenomenonreaction timevehicle dynamicsfluid flowstop and goThree.js

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install