A critical evaluation of the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) vehicle trajectory dataset

A clear understanding of car following behavior and microscopic relationships is critical for advancing traffic flow theory. Without empirical microscopic data, plausible but incorrect hypotheses perpetuate in the vacuum. The Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) project was undertaken to collect such data and the NGSIM data set has become the de facto standard, underlying the vast majority of empirically based advances of the past decade. But there has been a growing minority of researchers who have found unrealistic relationships in the NGSIM data. To date, the critical findings have almost exclusively come from the existing NGSIM database itself. Unfortunately, as this paper shows, the NGSIM errors are beyond anything that could be corrected strictly through cleaning or interpolation of the reported NGSIM data.

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