Thermodynamic phase transitions reveal the resilience structure of urban traffic congestion
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866910192130588672 |
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| author | Olmos, Luis E. |
| author_facet | Olmos, Luis E. |
| contents | Understanding how cities transition from free-flowing to congested traffic remains a central open problem in urban science. Here we show that city-scale congestion undergoes a reproducible nonlinear transition analogous to an order-disorder phase transition in statistical mechanics, in which aggregate mobility acts as a control parameter and jam extent as a collective order parameter. Crucially, this analogy is not merely formal: we derive and empirically identify an effective thermodynamic temperature with concrete physical meaning, quantifying infrastructural heterogeneity and how broadly a city explores congestion configurations as demand increases. Low-temperature cities are congestion-fragile: small mobility increases trigger sharp, system-wide jam transitions. This framework further reveals that the macroscopic fundamental diagram is an incomplete description of the traffic state: it emerges as a projection of a richer free-energy landscape governed by entropy-capacity trade-offs. Validated across 46 cities in Latin America and the Caribbean and independently confirmed with loop-detector data from 8 cities on three continents, these results establish a physics-based foundation for comparing urban traffic resilience and anticipating congestion regime shifts under changing mobility demand. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_03879 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Thermodynamic phase transitions reveal the resilience structure of urban traffic congestion Olmos, Luis E. Physics and Society Statistical Mechanics Understanding how cities transition from free-flowing to congested traffic remains a central open problem in urban science. Here we show that city-scale congestion undergoes a reproducible nonlinear transition analogous to an order-disorder phase transition in statistical mechanics, in which aggregate mobility acts as a control parameter and jam extent as a collective order parameter. Crucially, this analogy is not merely formal: we derive and empirically identify an effective thermodynamic temperature with concrete physical meaning, quantifying infrastructural heterogeneity and how broadly a city explores congestion configurations as demand increases. Low-temperature cities are congestion-fragile: small mobility increases trigger sharp, system-wide jam transitions. This framework further reveals that the macroscopic fundamental diagram is an incomplete description of the traffic state: it emerges as a projection of a richer free-energy landscape governed by entropy-capacity trade-offs. Validated across 46 cities in Latin America and the Caribbean and independently confirmed with loop-detector data from 8 cities on three continents, these results establish a physics-based foundation for comparing urban traffic resilience and anticipating congestion regime shifts under changing mobility demand. |
| title | Thermodynamic phase transitions reveal the resilience structure of urban traffic congestion |
| topic | Physics and Society Statistical Mechanics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03879 |