Universality in multispecies urban traffic

Collective phenomena involving motorcycles in mixed traffic, and more generally bicycles and other new micromobilities in cities, are of great interest, as the behavior of these vulnerable road users raises major safety concerns. This is especially true when the limited urban infrastructure is shared with conventional vehicles, such as cars. However, this topic is severely understudied from a physics point of view and a solid theoretical foundation of multispecies traffic does not exist. By studying the pNEUMA dataset, we first establish a nonlinear relationship between maneuverability and speed, which maps to the nonequilibrium concept of a sample space reducing process (SSR). Coupling SSR with Newell's nonlinear traffic model, we identify a power-law relationship between the average maneuverability (interpreted as temperature) and the mean speed difference between motorcycle and car populations. Simulation results allow us to recover a nonequilibrium phase transition from an ordered state of lane formation to a disordered state of cluster formation governed by a universal scaling exponent that is robust to traffic conditions and model variants. Our contribution creates a link between microscopic behaviors and the macroscopic theory of percolation.