What Is traffic-simulation.de and What Can You Do There?

Updated

traffic-simulation.de is a free, browser-based microsimulation of traffic flow built around an onramp scenario. It is a research and teaching demo rather than a commercial product: you open the page, watch individual vehicles (each simulated separately) merge and interact, and adjust the parameters that govern their behavior. No installation or account is needed — it runs in the browser using an HTML5 canvas. If your browser does not support the canvas tag, the simulation will not display.

What the site actually is

The page is titled "Microsimulation of Traffic Flow: Onramp" and is credited to Martin Treiber. It sits alongside the MovSim project (with sources on GitHub) and his books Traffic Flow Dynamics and Verkehrsdynamik. That context matters: what you are looking at is a visualization of a traffic-flow model, not a game with levels or a planning tool for real roads.

"Microsimulation" here means each car is modeled as an individual agent with its own speed, acceleration, and gap to the vehicle ahead, rather than treating traffic as a continuous fluid. The onramp is the focal scenario because merging behavior is where many traffic phenomena (congestion, capacity drops) become visible.

What you can do on the page

The main interactive element is the Ramp-Metering Game. Ramp metering means controlling how many vehicles are allowed to enter the highway from the onramp, usually via a signal, to keep mainline traffic flowing. In the game you try to manage that inflow and see the consequences.

Beyond the game, the page exposes simulation parameters you can change, grouped by behavior:

Group Parameters shown
Traffic flow General inflow, onramp flow, truck percentage, timelapse
Car-following Max speed (v0), time gap (T), max acceleration (a)
Lane-changing Politeness, lane-change threshold, right bias for cars, right bias for trucks

Changing these lets you test how driver aggressiveness, vehicle mix, or lane discipline affect the resulting traffic patterns.

How to use it

  1. Open traffic-simulation.de in a browser that supports HTML5 canvas (any current version of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari).
  2. Watch the default run to see baseline behavior on the mainline and the onramp.
  3. Adjust one parameter at a time — for example, raise the onramp flow or lower the time gap T — and observe what changes.
  4. Try the Ramp-Metering Game to see how controlling inflow affects congestion.

The value comes from changing one variable and watching the effect, since the parameters interact: a lower time gap (T) lets cars follow more closely, which can raise capacity but also make breakdown more likely.

Who it is for

  • Students and learners who want to see car-following and lane-changing models in action instead of only reading equations.
  • Researchers and educators who want a quick, no-setup way to demonstrate traffic-flow concepts, with the underlying MovSim code available on GitHub.
  • Curious visitors who want to play the ramp-metering game and get an intuition for why onramps cause congestion.

It is not a tool for designing a specific real-world intersection, and it does not produce engineering reports — it is an educational and exploratory simulation.

Practical notes

  • No pricing or login is indicated on the page; it presents itself as an open demo tied to the author's research.
  • The simulation depends on the HTML5 canvas, so an old or restricted browser will show nothing.
  • The GitHub link and the two books are the route to the underlying models if you want to go beyond the interactive page.