Criticism of Generally Accepted Fundamentals and Methodologies of Traffic and Transportation Theory

It is shown that fundamentals of traffic and transportation theory like Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) theory, the General Motors model class, principles for traffic and transportation network optimization and control (e.g., Wardrop's user equilibrium (UE) and system optimum (SO) principles) are not consistent with the set of the fundamental empirical features of traffic breakdown at a highway bottleneck. Alternatively to these generally accepted fundamental of traffic and transportation theory, we discuss three-phase traffic theory as the basis for traffic flow modeling as well as briefly consider the network breakdown minimization (BM) principle for the optimization of traffic and transportation networks with road bottlenecks.